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Three years into his fourth term, Karunanidhi hobbles for the first time

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

"There is no threat from the Centre," Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi has declared umpteen times in the last few weeks. "The Tamil Nadu government cannot be dismissed under any pretext," reassured his law minister, Alladi Aruna. And not without reason, since the cadres of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam need reassurances as much as the chief minister -- despite the fact that he entered the third year of his fourth term as chief minister on Wednesday.

Unsure and tentative. If those are the words used to describe a regime in its early weeks, they still apply to the chief ministership of Karunanidhi, who has gained 10 years experience in that office. He has seen three generations of voters and won a mandate from them each time; he has seen three generations of bureaucrats and won over their approbation; and he has seen three generations of DMK ministers and won their adoration bordering on deification. Yet, he has not been able to deliver this one time, which is surprising for a man even his worst critics used to admire as an 'able ruler'.

Karunanidhi is reaping the sour fruits of the seeds he sowed as the first effective non-Congress chief minister in the state, after DMK founder C N Annadurai's short stint from 1967 to 1969. Deification, which had worked wonders for M G Ramachandran and Jayalalitha, Karunanidhi's political bete noire in succession, has deprived him of an efficient second-line to run an able administration, in the absence of the charisma the other two wielded at the height of their glory.

If loyalty over efficiency has rendered the party machinery ineffectual over a period, nepotism and favouritism of an unprecedented variety when Karunanidhi first came to office has degenerated to such an extent that today the bureaucracy is inefficient at best, and insincere and corrupt otherwise. Though the rot set in during Jayalalitha's regime, Karunanidhi, despite his proven skills of the past, has not been able to do anything about it.

Suffice to point out, that the commencement of the DMK government's third year in office on Wednesday was marked by a transport employees's strike, the second in a week, covering most parts of the state. Though political motives are privately attributed to these attempts at trying to bring the government to a halt, if only to justify the dismissal demands, the fact remains that the administration has not been able to do anything about it.

The teachers's agitation during paper-evaluation for secondary school and junior college examinations, preceded by an unprecedented leakage of question papers -- they were sold in the open market, unheard of in the state at least -- large-scale power-cuts, increasing costs, higher power tariff and milk prices under the public distribution system, confusion over issuance of new ration cards for over two years, unserviceable roads, particularly in the interiors with nothing done even under a new dispensation, and crashing paddy prices, all have been among the woes of the common man in the last two years.

There is discontent everywhere in the state. And the government has been able to do precious little about it, other than indulging in wordy duels of little consequence. And most of the productive time of the ministers is wasted in answering charges levelled by the rival All India Anna DMK. Not that there is much they can do about it, given their own lack of perception, and eagerness to learn and adapt. Worse still, the CM, purely out of political considerations, has not been able to effect the much-needed cabinet reshuffle.

If the DMK government focussed most of its energies in its early months in office to 'fix' Jayalalitha and her aides for their errors of omission and commission from her days as chief minister, that time was not used productively to learn the tricks of the ministerial trade, or to put the administration back on the rails. Instead, Jaya-baiting became a habit that fails to die. The unwelcome Lok Sabha poll results have only added to the hoarseness and shrillness of the anti-Jaya chants by the DMK that they have started seeing the ghosts of dismissal from their past.

If Karunanidhi's early successes were on the law and order front, where known goons who were running amuck under an irresponsible AIADMK regime were eliminated by a re-energised police force, that wasn't to last long. True, the days of katta-panchayat, a rough equivalent of Bombay's 'supari contract', are a thing of the past, but their place has been taken by the likes of the Coimbatore blasts and the police riots earlier of November, to quell which the army had to be called in.

Karunanidhi is a tired man now, at 75. Unlike the political leader he used to be known as, he keeps eating his words: after refuting the BJP's claims on a human bomb at Coimbatore targetted at L K Advani, he has now said there was not one, but three human-bombs, as if to please the BJP leadership and try save his government's skin.

Unlike the 'able administrator' with his finger on the pulse of the people that he used to be, Karunanidhi as chief minister, has faltered at every step this time round. Be it the bus fare hike, power tariff rise, or mill price increase, he always went ahead and effected the change, only to go back and find a middle-path after popular backlash.

These apart, his tentative ties with the Tamil Maanila Congress contributed to the DMK's unimpressive performance in the Lok Sabha polls. This has triggered off demands and speculation over his government's imminent fall, in turn rendering the bureaucracy and administration even more unsure and tentative.

If Karunanidhi continues to be there, it's because he is already there. And the people too still have memories of the terrible five years preceding his return to office. For him, the BJP as a political alternative is still a toddler, and the TMC is even more tentative and unsure of itself and its vote-gathering capacity. And unlike the past, Karunanidhi, after 60 long years in politics, wants to demit office this one time in glory, with the last of controversies attending on his administration. Even if it meant taking an unknown interest in national politics, if only to divert public attention from his many failures.

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