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One groom, three brides

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

On Tuesday, September 15, the Tamil Nadu capital of Madras will brim with national leaders. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Home Minister Lal Kishinchand Advani of the BJP, Defence Minister and Samata Party chief George Fernandes, the Akali Dal's Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, his Jammu and Kashmir counterpart and National Conference all-in-all Farooq Abdullah...

And so on and so on.

Vajpayee and all his coalition partners -- barring All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam supremo J Jayalalitha, of course -- would be in to attend the 90th birth anniversary celebrations of C N Annadurai, the late founder of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, who, yet, is, the patron-saint of its rival, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.

It's the MDMK rally that the leaders will be attending -- as allies.

And it's the MDMK rally that Jayalalitha will be boycotting -- as ally.

On Tuesday, while the prime minister and his followers participate in the Madras celebrations, Jayalalitha will have a show of her own. In Tiruchi.

After which, will come the DMK's two-day state conference at Tirunelveli, on September 17 and 18.

The idea behind these shows is simple: the three Dravidian parties want to convince their cadres about their invincibility. Plus, woo the BJP leadership, projecting their worth as a future electoral ally in the state.

Jayalalitha has appealed to her cadres to prove their strength at Tiruchi. DMK supremo and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi has told his men that the party will have to take a few major decisions on its role at the national-level at the Tirunelveli meet. And MDMK general secretary Vaiko, who has been less circumspect than the other two, hopes to prove the 'national legitimacy' of his party through the presence of Anna's 'old friends' like Vajpayee, and politicial allies like the Akali Dal and National Conference.

This would also, he hopes, proclaim that "Tamil Nadu is the land of Annadurai."

Vaiko's claim is that after the DMK and AIADMK, it's now the MDMK's turn to rule Tamil Nadu, and it has the blessings of the BJP and its allies from other states.

Incidentally, this is the DMK's golden jubilee. The party was founded on a rainy day in September 1949, at what was then Robinson Park, Madras. It has come a long way since, breaking away from its parent, the Dravidar Kazhagam, founded by 'Periyar' E V Ramaswamy Naicker as a socio-political organisation with no electoral ambitions.

As 'Periyar' feared, it has today compromised on some of the basic tenets of the parent body. It eschewed secessionism at the height of the Chinese invasion in 1962, though by comparison the DMK's call for a 'separate Tamil Nadu' was not terrorism, as was the case in the North-East, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir. The call was completely political. It was an expression of Tamil aspirations on the national arena, with the DMK leaders whipping up the hoary history of the Tamils and their contemporary underdog existence.

If the DMK draws its political genealogy from the Justice Party, it is not without reason. Primarily a non-Brahmin upper-caste outfit of religious and elitist landlords, the Justice Party had run the Madras Presidency administration even before Gandhi made the Congress popular. When the party died a natural death, after ensuring caste-based reservations in government jobs, its only agenda, and the DK took up its social cause, the DMK had to naturally focus on political aspects if it were to survive. Which it did.

Successive Congress governments since 1937 ensured that the DK, and later the DMK, had a socio-political agenda, based on the former's lop-sided policies and programmes, mostly unrelated to the masses, whose common cause the Dravidian outfits championed. If Gandhi took the Congress to the masses, the very same way 'Periyar', once a vice- president of the party's Tamil Nadu wing, popularised the 'non- Brahmin movement' of the Justice Party. The DMK took it to its logical, political end.

Fifty years down the line and two major splits later, the DMK is not what it was. If by capitalising on the 'anti- establishment vote' against the Congress government, fuelled as it was by the 'anti-Hindi agitation' and rice shortage, the DMK came to power in 1967, the same factor worked against the party 10 years down the line. The party's erstwhile treasurer and star-marketer, M G Ramachandran, distanced himself so completely from the Karunanidhi leadership of the DMK by the 1977 election that his AIADMK, founded in 1972, won the poll. The MDMK was founded in 1993, when Karunanidhi tried to keep the party under his stranglehold.

It's possibly this 'timely splits' within the DMK, aided by the growing disinterest of the Congress in the state, that has ensured such a long run for the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu. If the BJP has since replaced the Congress at the national-level, it is now in the process of doing so in the state as well. Or, at least that's what the three Dravidian parties seem to believe.

For one, the Dravidian movement has come a long way, and its days in political office has helped convert many of its social goals into positive administrative actions. This has rendered ideology and policies relatively irrelevant to the new generation. Thus, what happened to the Congress in the state in 1967 is happening to the DMK now.

The MDMK is the less radical of the three Dravidian forces. The AIADMK was the first to become closer to the BJP, which was once considered anti-Dravidian. The DMK soon followed suit. And now it is the turn of the MDMK to woo the BJP.

The MDMK considers itself as the Dravidian party of the future, which claim it wants attested by the BJP and the rest. In contrast, the AIADMK wants the BJP by its side, in the absence of the Congress, which in turn has refused to be wooed in recent months. The DMK, too, distanced from its ideology by time, and weakened by successive splits, accepts the relevance of the BJP in its new avatar.

However, at least in the DMK's case, the idea of an outright alliance with the BJP might prove repulsive to the cadres. The leadership has also been considering alternative ideas, including a 'Kamaraj plan' of sorts, for some controversial and ambitious senior ministers in the Karunanidhi government to take up organisational work.

Such a move would help revive Dravidian traditions, and clear the way for a smooth succession for M K Stalin, Karunanidhi's son and the party's youth wing leader. But the leadership had faltered after making a few false starts on the eve of its two earlier state conferences. It remains to be seen whether it will gather enough courage at Tirunelveli, as there could be some opposition and Karunanidhi may not like to mark a historic occasion with an avoidable controversy.

The three parties are also trying to contain the growth of an alternative national force in the state. Already, they are saddled with the Tamil Maanila Congress, which, with its centrist agenda and the 'glory of the Congress past', is appealing to the increasing ranks of non-committed voters, who are getting increasingly tired of the Dravidian parties.

It is in such a context that this week's show of comparative strengths by the DMK, AIADMK and the MDMK becomes relevant. Their relative competence lies in their competitiveness in wooing the BJP and then subjugating it under a compromise formula without being seen doing so. Whether or not the BJP bites the bait all over again, after the Lok Sabha poll experience with the AIADMK and MDMK, or uses them, only time and the Tamil Nadu voter can tell.

EARLIER REPORT:
• Tigers cast a shadow over MDMK's Madras rally
• Jaya to skip town during MDMK's rally

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