Moopanar is still a Congress MP!

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

To which political party does G K Moopanar belong? To the Tamil Maanila Congress, of course, you may say -- but also to the parent Congress, if you please. The TMC's founder-president is still a Congress member of the Rajya Sabha.

The question of Moopanar's political identity assumes significance in the present context, though none really bothered about it until now.

Even without his Rajya Sabha identity, many United Front partners had reservations about him, given his Congress past "which he has not been able to shun" as one of them put it.

The Leftists in the United Front were clear that they would not do business with the Congress directly in the formation of any new government at the Centre. The likes of the Telugu Desam Party's Nara Chandrababu Naidu and the Asom Gana Parishad's Prafulla Mahanta had their own reasons for not favouring any leader with a Congress past. Even fellow Tamil leader M Karunanidhi, the DMK supremo, was not known to be enthusiastic about Moopanar, despite his public proclamations of support.

They all had a common cause. The Congress is the main Opposition party in their respective states and they could not obviously have a Congress leader of whatever hue as prime minister. Among them, only Karunanidhi could not come out in the open against another Tamil occupying the prime minister's office.

Moopanar was a Congress member of the Rajya Sabha when he quit the party and formed the TMC on the eve of the general election last year. He did not care to quit his membership of the House nor did the P V Narasimha Rao leadership of the Congress party move against him under the anti-defection law. Though Moopanar's election as TMC president via the first formal party poll earlier this year formalised that party's existence as well, he remains a Congress MP.

Two other TMC leaders are still Congress members of the Rajya Sabha -- Peter Alphonse and Jayanti Natarajan, both Moopanar aides and general secretaries of the party. Twenty TMC members won last year's election to the Lok Sabha, on the party's bicycle symbol.

This is not the first time that the question of divided loyalties has come up. After the Arjun Singh-N D Tiwari revolt when the two were sacked from the party, Tamil Nadu had the largest contingent of Congress MPs backing the rebellious duo. Among them were former Union ministers P Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, R Prabhu and Vazhappadi K Ramamurthy.

Unsure of his future strategy, P V Narasimha Rao took no action against them nor did he seek their disqualification under the anti-defection law. It was their losing last year's election under the Congress (Indira) ticket that did them in. Some of them are now back in the Congress along with Singh and Tiwari.