Metamorphosis Of Belief

Ideologies have always been notoriously susceptible to political exigencies. And M. Karunanidhi, now in his fourth term as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, is no exception to that dictum. The 77-year-old leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, who’s ruled the state for a total of 13 years since 1969, is clearly emerging as a man of contradictions. Be it the case of DMK cadres sporting the religious kumkum on their foreheads or his equivocation on the rss, Karunanidhi seems to be trapped between his own past and the imperatives of state power. His latest utterances on developments in Sri Lanka are yet another indicator of the competitive forces acting within the DMK.

Within a span of fifteen days Karunanidhi has made five contradicting statements. First, after the fall of Elephant Pass, he told the state legislative assembly that "India must refrain from sending its army to Sri Lanka and from extending arms, ammunition and logistical support." He also criticised the Centre for not taking the state government into confidence. But following his visit to New Delhi, he changed tack and said that he "would not like to tie the Centre’s hands in taking appropriate steps to resolve the crisis in Lanka". Then, a couple of days later, in a press conference held to mark the completion of four years of DMK rule, he said that "he would be happy if the Tamils in Sri Lanka get Eelam". On May 15, in the state legislative assembly, he once again changed his tune: "The DMK has distanced itself from the LTTE long ago."

In a long speech, the CM said that, "the relationship between the DMK and the LTTE must be seen in a historical perspective." He went on to add that even before the killing of the eprlf leader, Padmanabha, in Chennai in June ‘90, the gunning down of one Sri Lankan Tamil leader after another by the LTTE had raised serious concerns about the Tigers’ claim of protecting Tamil interests. After listing the fratricidal killings carried out by the LTTE since 1986, the DMK chief said: "We were sceptical even then of the LTTE trying to save the Tamil race when it was going around destroying its own brethren." Karunanidhi also recollected the LTTE’s act of slight when it spurned an equal share to all Tamil groups of the fund collection made by his party in 1986.

Why should a leader with more than five decades of political experience and shrewdness fail to give a cohesive direction for his party as well as the government on such a crucial issue? What forced him to toe the Union government’s line without even retaining the right to criticise and offer mid-term correction over an issue which has an explosive emotional content? Why is he working overtime to see that the war in Jaffna becomes an issue between New Delhi and Colombo and Chennai is kept out of it? According to party old-timers, the present confusion is due to the change in the basic characteristics of the party that’ve taken place over the last decade. "From being a socio-political movement the DMK now is a mere administrative structure," observes a senior functionary.

The new identity of the DMK is not one that addresses the needs of subaltern classes but that of a DMK Inc, where the question of governance has a very restrictive meaning. When the party first proposed the idea of "self-rule in the state and then collective rule" at the centre nearly four decades ago, it was based on the principle that for a large country like India the particular needs of a region may be at variance with those of the centre and only by a system of balance between these could the political system sustain its plural obligations to the people. But after becoming a part of the ruling elite in Delhi, the party is slowly losing its role of addressing issues that are vital to the region but of peripheral consideration to the centre.

Many among the section worried about the DMK losing its identity as a regional player cite other examples-imbued with similar emotive content-to prove the point. "The Cauvery River Water Authority created by the BJP-led government is an ideal example where the state has virtually surrendered its right to fight for its due share of water to the centre." How can Karunanidhi justify the existence of the authority when the Karnataka chief minister refuses to attend its meetings convened by the prime minister, they ask.

Vaiko’s expulsion from the party in 1993 had, in more ways than one, helped the party redefine itself. The more ideologically inclined section walked away with the rebel to form the MDMK. As the split took place within two years of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, it also contrived to give the DMK an image that was more acceptable to the middle-class. Since then, the party has been trying to project itself as the representative of this group.

The shift of the DMK’s focus from the underprivileged to the middle-class has had two immediate fallouts. First, the mbcs and the Dalits moved out of the movement and tried to politically organise themselves on caste lines to fight for their legitimate share in political and state power. Today, there’s not a single caste that does not have its own organisation in Tamil Nadu. Second, from its five-decade long position of a left-of-centre economic policy, the party turned rightwards. Today, the DMK wants to be seen as the engine of the liberalisation process. "We can’t permit some of the Congressmen and the entire Left to derail the reform process. We must be fully equipped to lead the country in the new economy that’s knocking on our doors," the DMK parliamentary party leader and Union minister for commerce and industry, Murasoli Maran, said at a recent party meeting.

According to one of the party’s leading speakers, in the last seven-eight years, the DMK’s mode of reaching out to people has been completely transformed. "Earlier, there used to be at least one public meeting a day in every district. Full-time party activists like me used to explain the party’s position on various issues and what the agenda for the future would be. Now, the party is relying only on the mass media. It’s not just the industrial workers who have become obsolete with liberalisation. Even we are jobless," laments a fiery speaker who used to get tens of thousands people to listen to his oration.

In its new avatar as DMK Inc, the accent is on involving outsiders. The party had a long list of competent people as in-house resources for its various propaganda and social engineering projects. "In the beginning we didn’t rely on the mass media. We created our own media. Our leaders wrote, directed, produced plays and films. C.N. Annadurai, Karunanidhi and Murasoli Maran have written more film scripts than most of the professional screenplay writers in the country. Our films used to bear the distinct party identity. The last political film made from within the party was Palaivana Rojakal (Roses of the desert) written by Karunanidhi in 1987," observes a party man. None of the party top leaders are now involved in any creative exercises. This was a party that boasted of great poets like Bharathi Dasan and Kannadasan; original fiction writers like Karunanidhi, S.S. Thenarasu, T.K. Srinivasan and theorists like party general secretary Anbazhagan and Murasoli Maran. The last piece of fiction by Karunanidhi was a short story after the demolition of the Babri Mosque. After publishing his first volume of the History of the Dravidian Movement in 1991, Maran has not written anything substantial. Today, even for the party’s literary functions, professional film lyricists are invited to compose poems.

The outsourcing extends to even getting film stars to endorse the party. Starting from N.S. Krishnan and K.R. Ramaswamy in the late ‘40s, Sivaji Ganesan in the ‘50s and M.G. Ramachandran in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, the party had its own stars who also held organisational positions. In the ‘90s, floating stars like Rajnikanth and Vijaykanth, who are not even party members, are deployed during elections. With this level of corporatisation, the party has indeed travelled from one end of the spectrum to the other. And Karunanidhi’s contradictions stem from the overwhelming burden of this rather long journey.