The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Radia revelations have turned the DMK family soap opera even more interesting.

Raja “So, who planted in the minds of Congress saying Alagiri doesn’t know English? I know.”

Radia “No, no, no, no… not only that. Not only that. That he and Stalin tomorrow will be the only ones left to run the party because the old man is senile and he is not going to be around any longer, and therefore Congress will be happy doing business with him… him eventually, and he controls Stalin.”

Scripting a success is often easier than conscripting a successor. Overthrowing the old Brahminical order, as Muthuvel Karunanidhi—one-time film scriptwriter, long-time chief of the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK), Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and ‘senile old man’ of the Radia Tapes—did during the course of his ascent to power in the state, is turning out to be the easy part. Overseeing the rise of a new order, or any sense of order actually, within his own family is proving relatively harder. After all, where ears were once affixed to pronouncements of the party patriarch, they are now attuned to whispers of palace intrigue.

Large it may be, but it is a family Karunanidhi fawns over. So he cannot but be alarmed by the latest tantrum thrown by his son MK Alagiri, who is threatening to resign from the party and Union Cabinet unless the 2G-scam-tainted A Raja is thrown out of the DMK.

“He has brought notoriety to the party,” is Alagiri’s current refrain. This, as everyone in Tamil Nadu can see, is the latest episode in a long-running family drama. It makes news less for the morality of the posture and more because Alagiri was supposed to be on the other side of the big family divide. In his battle for succession with younger brother and DMK heir apparent MK Stalin, Alagiri grew close to his half-sister and poetess-turned-parliamentarian Kanimozhi, and by extension to her friend A Raja, the former telecom minister who stands accused of making out-of-turn 2G spectrum allotments in 2008 at throwaway prices. Even in mid-2009, the time of the Radia Tapes extract printed above, Raja and Niira Radia would have been very upset about Dayanidhi Maran (the ‘he’ in ‘he and Stalin’) running Alagiri down.

For the past decade, fiercely ranged against each other were Stalin and Alagiri, both Karunanidhi’s sons born of his second wife Dayalu Ammal (the first passed away years ago). Kanimozhi, the patriarch’s daughter born to ‘third wife’ Rajathi Ammal, joined Alagiri’s camp a few years ago. But family equations are now in flux with the 2G scam haunting the party’s electoral chances. “The DMK’s term has been relatively scam free,” says political analyst Cho Ramaswamy, “The problem comes from the whole nation, which seems in an unforgiving mood on corruption.” The Rs 1.76 lakh crore sum, the alleged loss Raja caused the Centre, is on voters’ minds. “It will have an effect on the polls due in May, as the DMK’s reputation has been damaged,” he says, “The CM is seen to be promoting his family, and despite all the freebies [on 9 January, the CM issued an order to give away another 1 million TV sets], there is disenchantment among voters. That is why people are flocking to Jayalalithaa rallies.”

At first, the telecom scam was simply an opportunity to isolate Alagiri and Kanimozhi for Stalin and the Maran brothers; Kalanithi Maran, who runs Sun TV, is the other one, and both of them are sons of the late Murasoli Maran, nephew of Karunanidhi.

After the recent CBI raids on establishments and associates of Raja, Rajathi and Kanimozhi, however, there has been a shift of camp loyalties. Now Alagiri too is distancing himself from the trio under the 2G scanner. “I don’t understand why Kalaignar [literally ‘artiste’, as Karunanidhi is fondly called by his fans] is insisting on keeping him, while the Congress is dropping tainted Union and chief ministers,” goes Alagiri’s ongoing gripe, raising the ante with words crafted to express selfless concerns, all the better to play on his 87-year-old father’s mind. It’s a well-wisher’s tone he uses quite often. “Appa, you must continue to be CM in your lifetime,” he is routinely known to urge his father, “after that, we will take a decision.”

According to a DMK insider, Alagiri knows what he is doing, even if onlookers don’t: “He has smelt the anti-corruption mood, at least among urban voters.” Playing election saviour, he thinks, will boost his profile within the party. Moreover, Karunanidhi has let his fondness for Rajathi, who also doubles as a fundraiser for the party, slip long enough to express some anger at the conduct of her branch of the family. “Even my intelligence agency failed to tip me off on your shameful behaviour,” he is reported to have told them, “The Radia Tapes have exposed the three of you.”

Karunanidhi’s exact disposition cannot be confirmed, however, given his liking for hand and eye gestures as a means of communication, not to mention his quaint terminology when he does speak; Rajathi Ammal, for example, is “my daughter Kanimozhi’s mother”. Even critics agree that it takes a true love of theatre to match a casual disregard for polygamy law with a cunning approach to linguistics. It also takes a crafty sense of fairness. “His two wives have a say in everything,” confides a DMK insider, “and often their advice is contradictory, as each strains to get the ageing patriarch’s ear.” Says another, “To balance family relations, he has for years always had his afternoon siesta at Rajathi’s house and not at his Gopalapuram residence.”

Just two years ago, both wives were seen in attendance on either side of him, after the CM decided one fine morning to sit in protest at Chennai beach over Karnataka’s blocking of a drinking water project on the river Cauvery. Recalls an observer, “If one would give him a glass of water, the other would immediately whip out a Japanese fan and wave it vigorously to keep him cool—while the man himself sat impassively trying to make a political point.”

If the spousal rivalry has been comical, the sibling rivalry has been bitter. “One fine day, Alagiri woke up to find his little brother Stalin had upstaged him and was heir apparent,” says the DMK source, “In Tamilian families, it is an insult if the elder born is passed over. His ego just couldn’t take it.” That’s when he threw his first tantrum. Stalin’s heirdom, however, was only made more apparent. And a rebellious Alagiri found himself banished in 2003 to Madurai for an exercise in ‘party building’. As luck would have it, the rebel emerged as a mass leader there, rallying the cadres, swinging unlikely bypoll victories, surprising his enemies, and even shrugging off a murder charge (with frantic help from his mother, it must be added).

Ever since, both the brothers have operated as parallel power centres within the DMK—though Stalin, now Deputy CM, has an official advantage. Perhaps even an obvious one. Saying this aloud within the party, though, can be perilous. The Maran brothers discovered this in May 2007, when their Tamil daily Dinakaran published a ‘survey’ claiming that Stalin had 70 per cent support of Tamils as Karunanidhi’s heir, while Alagiri and Kanimozhi had just 2 per cent each. Enraged Alagiri supporters burnt down the paper’s Madurai office. Three staffers died, and the sibling rivalry achieved pageant proportions.

While it is a family Karunanidhi clearly fawns over, nobody endears him more than a puller of crowds. His eldest son MK Muthu, born to his first wife Padmavathi, learnt this the hard way. This tale goes back a few decades to the phase soon after DMK stalwart Annadurai’s death and Karunanidhi’s fight for leadership with MG Ramachandran, the cine-star-turned-politician who once upon a time played the face of the Dravidian revolution to his literary colleague’s script.

Keen to upstage MGR back in the early 1970s, Karunanidhi tried scripting Muthu’s future as a cinema superstar. After a few abject flops, though, the son was suddenly dumped. MGR was angered enough by the episode to break away and form the All India Anna Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (AIADMK), a rival party now led by MGR’s protégé Jayalalithaa. Even Muthu, rebelling against his father, joined the breakaway, but he was unable to succeed as a leader and turned alcoholic, ending up in rehab. He and his own son M Arivunidhi are now playback singers in the Tamil film industry. The DMK patriarch has lately been back in touch with his estranged son, and his grandson has even expressed an interest in joining politics, an interest that almost nobody has bothered to take note of.

The newly stoked aspirations that people would rather talk about are those of the Rajathi branch of the family. Kanimozhi, for whom the DMK patriarch is seen to have a soft corner, had kept aloof from politics till a few years ago. Sent to Delhi for her fluency in English as well as gender, and thus presumed charm with the Sonia-led Congress (the party’s main ally at the Centre), she quickly attained a stature of her own. Now she is thought to see herself as an inheritor of the party legacy in her own right, with or without the help of a half-brother who was by her side till just the other day and is now stunned by the scale of what she and her friend Raja have pulled off.

“In a nutshell, the male dominated part of the family is upset that she has outplayed them at their own game,” says a close family observer in the know.

Family or not, an upstart cannot hope to entirely escape moves to quell her ambitions. “What is happening now is that they [Stalin’s faction] and the Marans are ganging up to keep Rajathi out. For that, they may even mend fences with anne Alagiri,” says the observer, “But Kalaignar is very kind and would like every member of his family to get a share [in his legacy]. That is fair.” While Kanimozhi has her father’s blessings to count on for her Rajya Sabha seat, she is also aware that she has no mass base so far in Tamil politics, and has even expressed fears for her life, lately.

Such fears may seem odd of a politician whose confidence would impress any listener of the Radia Tapes—“Don’t tell mom, she will mess it up,” she is heard telling Radia at one point—but Kanimozhi is well aware what her half-brothers’ ire could imply, and she has been under considerable stress even without having to worry about their thugs. Calm and composed at most times, her raw nerves were on display recently when the CBI came a-raiding. “They are coming here?” she had asked in alarm, betraying an anxiety only novices do. Luckily for her, she recovered quickly enough to apprise the gathered media gaggle at home of how misunderstood her mother’s business dealings were, and hint how a third wife would have to suffer for the patriarch’s sake. This served to win sympathy, even as investigators hunted for Rajathi’s links with a murky property deal that saw a prime Chennai property, once leased by the Tata Group, ending up in the hands of an overseas investor for a pittance.

The party patriarch, meanwhile, has not been as harsh on either Kanimozhi or Raja as many in the DMK would like. “Do you think one man can make away with the alleged Rs 1.76 lakh crore?” goes Karunanidhi’s rhetoric, hinting at wider complicity in the 2G scam. “Kalaignar feels that it would be an admission of guilt if action is taken on Raja by the party whilst the CBI inquiry is underway,” says a senior DMK functionary, dismissing the relevance of Raja being a Dalit, “He is not a mass leader. By distancing him, the DMK will not distance Dalits. This is a story spun by his supporters to prevent any action against him.”

The DMK’s spin department has been in the hands of the Maran brothers ever since the emergence of the Sun TV network. In 2001, when Karunanidhi lost power and was arrested by the new CM Jayalalithaa, the channel kept Tamil airwaves agog with clips of his being carried off yelling, “They are killing me!” That single television blitz rallied more mass sympathy than he needed.

In those days, the Maran family was headed by Murasoli, who had forged the DMK’s alliance with the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Murasoli, it turns out, was luckier with matters of succession. Once he passed away in 2003, his sons Dayanidhi and Kalanithi split their roles nicely; one joined politics while the other ran the TV network. But their relations with Karunanidhi have not been free of strains. Soon after the Dinakaran fracas in 2007, Dayanidhi was abruptly replaced with Raja at the Union telecom ministry in New Delhi.

The story goes that the brothers had grown too powerful for Karunanidhi’s comfort, with the Sun Network refusing to toe his line. It was at this time that Rajathi proposed her daughter as an alternative to Dayanidhi in Delhi. As insiders tell it, Rajathi had long suspected the Marans of sneakily trying to take over the party under the guise of loyalty to Stalin.

In mid 2009, the Marans patched up with the patriarch after they allegedly made a huge party donation, though they are still being kept at arm’s length. What Stalin, now 53, privately makes of the Maran dilemma is unknown. What is obvious is that the DMK has turned well and truly dynastic. “Well, they are patrons of the DMK and we want a member of Kalaignar’s family to lead it, as they have sacrificed their entire lifetime to the party and state’s cause,” says a diehard DMK fan, “Both Stalin and Alagiri are tall leaders in their own right and have administrative experience. Don’t other parties have political dynasties too?”

As if in response to such sentiments, both Stalin’s son Udayanidhi Stalin, 30, and Alagiri’s daughter Kayalvizhi, 32, have recently entered the political arena in Chennai. Of course, they’re one generation too distant from the tussle that preoccupies the city. As of now, Karunanidhi’s preferred successor is Stalin. This has been signalled in several ways. The patriarch, for example, is said to have told Alagiri once: “You went to jail on a murder charge [of a party leader], but my younger son Stalin went to jail for Tamil pride [during the Emergency].” But Alagiri remains his mother’s favourite, and while Dayalu is not as active as Rajathi, she remains influential in family matters. In other words, it may yet be an open field.

Karunanidhi, though, for all the senility talk on telephones in Delhi, is in no mood to retire—at least from cinema. He continues to write screenplays. This Pongal, his 75th screenplay is scheduled to hit cinema screens. Titled Ilaignan and produced for Rs 30 crore by his grandson Udayanidhi’s Red Giant, it is expected to do slightly better than his Pen Singam (lioness), which flopped. Critics say he has long lost his touch. “There was a time when people loved flowery language, the rhetoric and atheist themes,” feels Cho Ramaswamy, “But Ilaignan is a costly ego massage for the old man.”

The film’s talking point, anyhow, is a Rs 3 crore ship set, which is fast becoming a Titanic metaphor for the party’s fortunes, having rammed as it has into a Rs 1.76 lakh crore iceberg. Aware of the shock value of this figure, the DMK is busy appealing to voters not to equate a ‘presumptive loss to the exchequer’ with a ‘looting of public money’, even citing Union Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal’s debunking of the CAG report in its defence.

The DMK could yet win Tamil Nadu again. But if it is ejected by the AIADMK, as some expect, the family will have to suffer its succession storm out of power. Adversity could change family equations yet again. Besides, you never know what else is on those tapes.

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