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Tamil Maanila Congress leader and member of Parliament Govindaswami Karuppiah Moopanar, who passed away on Thursday morning, rose from a grassroots level to occupy centre stage in national politics.
Affectionately called G K M by all, Moopanar, coming from an affluent family, became a trouble-shooter for two former prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi.
Moopanar, who earned the reputation of a gentleman par excellence, was born on August 19, 1931, to Govindaswamy Moopanar and Saraswathi Ammal.
Attracted by K Kamaraj's policies, he joined the Congress in the fifties and soon became the Thanjavur District Congress Committee chief, a position that he held till the death of Kamaraj on Oct 2, 1975.
When, in the presence of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, Moopanar and his followers joined the Congress on January 30, 1976, he became the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee president.
Taking note of his organisational skills, Indira Gandhi made him the general secretary of the All India Congress Committee in 1978.
During his secretaryship, she sent him to various states to quell dissident activities. Moopanar was instrumental in effecting change of several Congress chief ministers, which also earned him a lot of foes in the party.
When the Congress split after the 1977 Lok Sabha polls, the Bramhanada Reddy faction took possession of the party headquarters in New Delhi.
In 1978, Moopanar was elected to the Rajya Sabha, and, barring a short break, was a member of the upper house till he breathed his last.
It was Moopanar who came to the rescue of Indira Gandhi by readily vacating his house, allotted to him as a Rajya Sabha member, for the All India Congress Committee to function.
His political shrewdness and loyalty to the Nehru family came to light when he, as the AICC general secretary in charge of the party's parliamentary board, shot off a letter to the then president Zail Singh, nominating Rajiv Gandhi as the Congress parliamentary party leader after Indira Gandhi's assassination on October 30, 1984.
That letter averted a split in the Congress and changed the course of politics in the country.
Rajiv Gandhi also relied on him for running the organisation.
After the death of late Tamil Nadu chief minister M G Ramachandran, Rajiv Gandhi handpicked Moopanar for the post of the TNCC chief to prepare the party for the 1989 assembly polls. The former prime minister even named him as the chief ministerial candidate.
However, despite intense campaigning by Rajiv Gandhi, the party could not make any headway in the polls and Moopanar was sidelined by the party high command.
When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in Sriperumpudur on May 21, 1991, Moopanar was the first one to realise that his leader had been killed by a human bomb and made immediate arrangements to take the body to New Delhi.
He came to limelight once again, when he was appointed as the chief organiser for the Tirupati AICC session in 1992, when the then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao was elected as the Congress president.
When Rao ignored his advice and aligned with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam for the 1996 Lok Sabha and Tamil Nadu assembly polls, Moopanar, for the first time in his political career, revolted against the party's high command and floated his own outfit, the Tamil Maanila Congress.
In fact, his decision then to align with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam altered the political course both at the Centre and in the state.
The Congress suffered one of its worst defeats at the national level and the AIADMK was nearly wiped out in the Tamil Nadu assembly, with the party winning just four seats. The DMK-TMC combine swept the polls.
Moopanar reached the pinnacle of his political career when he, along with DMK president M Karunanidhi, became a 'king maker', a role played by his mentor Kamaraj at the national level for years.
With the TMC and DMK, accounting for 39 seats in the Lok Sabha, deciding to cast their lot with the 'United Front', a loose coalition of regional parties, H D Deve Gowda became the prime minister.
In the 1998 Lok Sabha elections, when the AIADMK and Bharatiya Janata Party fought the polls together in the state, the DMK-TMC combine put up a poor show, winning only eight of the total 39 seats in the state.
Moopanar's decision to oppose the confidence motion sought by Vajpayee in 1999 was instrumental in forcing a mid-term poll to the Lok Sabha.
If only the three-member TMC group had supported the motion, the Vajpayee ministry, which lost by just one vote, could have survived.
In the 1999 Lok Sabha polls, Moopanar floated a third front, which drew a blank. From then onwards, he slowly moved towards the AIADMK, which he once described as a 'corrupt party'.
Contesting the assembly polls in 2000 as an ally of the AIADMK, his party won 23 of the 32 contested seats.
Moopanar was also a keen lover of sports. He never missed an opportunity to watch a cricket match in Madras.
He was a follower of Carnatic music and was the patron of Sri Thyagaraja Sabha, which organises the annual festival in memory of Thyagaraja, one of the trinities of Carnatic music composers.
PTI
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