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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
The Last Lear
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| Can the aging patriarch of India’s most fractious political dynasty hold his family together—and continue to cling to power in Tamil Nadu? |
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DELHI PRESS ARCHIVES |
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| Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M Karunanidhi.
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N THE SCORCHING FRIDAY AFTERNOON of 11 May 2007,
at Chennai’s Island Grounds, Muthuvel Karunanidhi had
some important business to settle privately with Sonia
Gandhi. |
Gandhi, the Congress party president, had come to Chennai—along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and two
former prime ministers—to join the celebrations marking
Karunanidhi’s 50th anniversary as a legislator, an unprecedented
milestone in Indian politics. But on this humid summer
day, as thousands of his followers from across the state
converged on the burning sands to celebrate their leader’s
longevity, the then 83-year-old chief minister of Tamil
Nadu had something else on his mind.
“It was like a thorn for him, and he had to remove it with as little damage as possible,” said
an associate of Karunanidhi who described the conversation to me.
Minutes before the golden jubilee celebrations began, Karunanidhi took Gandhi aside. “Daya
has to be dropped,” Karunanidhi said, referring to his grand-nephew Dayanidhi Maran, then
the Union minister for communications and information technology. “He’s failed us.”
| ARUNJ |
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A picture of Karunanidhi as a child, displayed at the museum
celebrating his life in Thirukkuvalai. |
“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “Your wish will be fulfilled.” The United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) coalition government, then as now, required the support of Karunanidhi and his
party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). Gandhi, as chairperson of the ruling coalition
in the Lok Sabha, was unlikely to take issue with his request.
Dayanidhi Maran, then 41 years old, had served three years as the communications minister,
a plump portfolio in New Delhi that Karunanidhi had personally requested for him. Maran
quickly became the sophisticated face of the DMK in the capital: he spoke in fluent English
to the national press and wore designer shirts and trousers—a marked departure from the
dhoti-clad DMK politicians who had preceded him.
But back home, tensions had been rising between Karunanidhi
and his grand-nephews—Dayanidhi and his elder
brother, Kalanithi, who had leveraged party connections to
build a powerful media empire that included Sun TV, India’s
largest television network. Karunanidhi was convinced that
his own family had been shortchanged by Kalanithi Maran,
who had aggressively bought back the family’s shares in Sun
TV for well under the market value before taking the company
public in 2006. And now, Karunanidhi believed, the
Marans were intent on fomenting discord among his own
children, his chosen political heirs.
The spark that finally led Karunanidhi to take action
had been an opinion poll published in the Maran brothers’
newspaper Dinakaran on 9 May 2007, asking who should be
Karunanidhi’s successor. Seventy percent of the respondents
chose Karunanidhi’s younger son and the current deputy
chief minister, MK Stalin; his elder son, MK Azhagiri, placed
a distant second, with a meagre two percent. (A few days
earlier, the paper had published another instalment of the
survey, which had judged Dayanidhi Maran as the most efficient Tamil minister in Delhi, overtaking even the Congress
party’s P Chidambaram, then the Union finance minister.)
Karunanidhi believed that the Marans had no mass base
of their own, and that they were using their media (and
money) to promote Dayanidhi Maran and set off a debilitating
war of succession between Azhagiri and Stalin. Azhagiri’s
own supporters seemed to agree: on the morning the
poll was published, an angry mob of about 50 people attacked
the Dinakaran office in Madurai, Azhagiri’s home
base. They threw petrol bombs and set the newsroom on
fire; two journalists and a security guard were burned alive. Kalanithi Maran’s deputy and the chief operating officer of
the Sun TV Network, RM Ramesh, told the press that the
attack was orchestrated by Azhagiri himself, and that they
had evidence to prove it. Karunanidhi ordered an investigation,
but his first move was to axe the Marans.
“I angrily told Kalanithi Maran and Dayanidhi Maran to
stop the publication of the surveys,” Karunanidhi later said.
But they ignored him.
After his private chat with Sonia Gandhi, Karunanidhi
moved at lightning speed, ensuring that there would be no
opportunity for resistance. Within two days, he convened
the 148-member DMK administrative committee. The party
passed a unanimous resolution to remove Dayanidhi Maran
from the Union Cabinet in Delhi for “violating party discipline”,
forcing him to resign.
In the months after Maran’s removal, the political and familial
soap opera in Tamil Nadu grew into something like
open warfare: to rival the Marans’ Sun TV, Karunanidhi
launched his own television channel, Kalaignar TV (named
after the honorific given to him by his supporters: “Kalaignar”
translates as “scholar of the arts”); to fight the Marans’
cable distribution monopoly in Tamil Nadu, the chief minister
floated a state-owned distribution company, the Arasu
Cable Corporation. In an emotional column published in
November 2008 in the DMK’s party newspaper, Murasoli,
Karunanidhi publicly accused his grand-nephews of “attempting
to create trouble in my family” and cheating him
in the buy-back of Sun TV shares.
And then, after a year and a half of fighting, the family
patched up almost overnight, putting their good relations
on display by giggling and smiling together in a series of
photographs released by the Tamil Nadu government’s
press bureau. Nobody knows for certain what precipitated
the happy reunion, said to have been brokered by Karunanidhi’s
son Stalin and daughter Selvi. But a hint comes from
the leaked Niira radia tapes, in which the corporate lobbyist
tells former Hindustan Times editor Vir Sanghvi that the
Marans paid  6 billion to one of Karunanidhi’s two wives,
Dayalu Ammal—a sum, party sources told me, intended to
compensate Karunanidhi for the undervaluation of his family’s
Sun TV shares several years earlier.
The split between Karunanidhi and the Marans—and their
eventual, if fragile, reunion—may seem like ancient history
for the fractious DMK. But it neatly encapsulates almost every
aspect of the party under Karunanidhi: family rivalries,
big money, television power, greed, violent reprisal and outsized
influence in Delhi.
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Karunanidhi as a young activist. |
Today Dayanidhi Maran is back in the Union Cabinet as
the minister for textiles; his brother Kalanithi now sits at
the helm of Asia’s most profitable television network. Karunanidhi’s
elder son, Azhagiri, has been cleared of charges
relating to the murder of a former DMK minister, and sits
in the Union Cabinet as minister of chemicals and fertilisers.
But the troubles of family and party have only grown:
Karunanidhi’s favorite ward, Andimuthu Raja, who was
forced to resign as Union communications minister late last
year, now sits in a Delhi jail, accused of presiding over the
biggest scam in the history of Indian politics—the giveaway
of 2G mobile spectrum believed to have defrauded the government
of billions, if not trillions, of rupees. Karunanidhi’s
two wives, who have no source of income apart from their
husband and children, are accused of having amassed fortunes
in black money and playing key roles in crooked dealmaking.
And the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has
interrogated his poet daughter, the Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi,
over a suspicious 2.14-billion transfer in connection
with the spectrum scandal.
As the scams and allegations surrounding Karunanidhi
and his family multiply at a rate so rapid it’s hard to keep
track of them all, the grand patriarch of Dravidian politics
will face the most difficult test of his six decades in public
life when Tamil Nadu voters go to the polls on 13 April to
elect a new state government.
Karunanidhi built his political career on the foundation
of his skills as a screenwriter and orator, but the man who
has scripted 77 films and written more than 200,000 printed
pages now fears a dramatic climax over which he may have
no control—one that would see him ejected from office with
his reputation in tatters, his family deprived of their political
inheritance, and his party splintered into warring factions.
Publicly, Karunanidhi is still projecting an image of confidence and self-assurance, but as the fallout from the 2G
scam continues to strain his relationship with the Congress,
India’s most experienced politician has begun to confess his
anxieties to a handful of his closest friends. “Without realising
it”, he tells them repeatedly, “Sonia Gandhi is doing
exactly what Indira Gandhi did to me.” Now 87, confined to
his motorised wheelchair, uncertain of whom to trust, the
elderly DMK kingpin has begun to feel increasingly helpless,
party insiders told me. And this, they say, only makes
him angrier and angrier.
| I |
N THE SMALL VILLAGE OF THIRUKKUVALAI, 300
kilometres south of Chennai and nestled not far
from the sea, endless fields of rice paddies seem
to stretch to the horizon in every direction. Palm
and tamarind trees shade the roads, and the modest
brick houses are fenced by bamboo panels or
hibiscus bushes. |
It was here that Karunanidhi was born in 1924, into a
poor Isai Vellalar family, members of a temple-dependent
caste that traditionally played the Nadaswaram, a south
Indian wind instrument. With very little income from his
caste vocation, Karunanidhi’s father, Muthuvelar, took to
singing ballads and practicing vaidya—traditional medicine. Karunanidhi, the family’s first son, born after two girls, was
treated with special reverence at home: at an early age, his
father introduced him to the epics, oral stories and music.
The house where Karunanidhi was born is now a museum
celebrating his life in politics, and is filled with photographs
of his family and of Karunanidhi rubbing shoulders with
everyone from the Pope to Indira Gandhi. The pictures have
no captions; their contents were described to me by the museum’s
middle-aged curator, who smelt distinctly of hooch.
Outside, the voluminous tales of Thirukkuvalai’s villagers
presented a more sprawling portrait of Karunanidhi; it was
difficult to walk more than a few metres without coming
across someone willing to share a memory or a story that
had become local folklore, whether flattering or scandalous.
Most of these stories would be impossible to verify, and
their tellers were unanimously unwilling to be quoted talking
about the chief minister, especially if the story in question
involved a female relative of Karunanidhi. But the villagers
were unquestionably proud of the fact that a boy who
had once run through these streets had risen to become the
most powerful man in the state.
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With
CN Annadurai, his predecessor and founder of the DMK. |
The daughter of the man who taught music to Karunanidhi
at one of the village temples, now 80 years old herself,
remembered him as a sensitive boy. “He used to come to us,
and cry and cry,” she told me. “He could not take my father’s
scolding.”
It was his music classes, however, that gave Karunanidhi
his first practical lessons in politics, and not merely because
of his teacher’s scolding: the classes mirrored the rigid caste
hierarchies of the era; Karunanidhi was not allowed to wear
cloth to cover his upper body and was restricted to learning
only a few songs.
His musical training did not last long, but the lessons he
learnt created a fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas of
EV Ramasamy, the Tamil reformer known to his admirers
as “Periyar” (“the great one”). At 14, Karunanidhi became a
student activist in Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement, which
proposed a militant awakening of the Dravidian people—composed of non-Brahmin southerners—against the hegemony
of “Aryan” north Indians and their Brahmin “representatives”
in the south.
Periyar had been active in the Indian National Congress,
but came to regard it as an upper-caste north Indian party
that was insufficiently committed to social reforms like the
elimination of caste hierarchies and the uplift of lowercaste
Hindus. Under the broad banner of “social justice”,
the Dravidian ideology that he espoused was influenced by
rationalism, communism and the ancient Tamil epics, and
called for the creation of an independent nation in South India,
which he called Dravida Nadu.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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MK
2 November 2011
07:20 AM
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This article has given a remarkable insight of Karunanidhi but forgot to give the details of MGR who was brought to the screen and politics by Karunanidhi. That was the worst thing he did to Tamil Nadu and TN never wants to come out of that celluloid obsession till now which is the curse for TN. It continutes with MGR, his third wife Janaki, his another love Jayalilitha, Vijayakanth and another vier Vijay... No real politician like Kamarajar will emerge.
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Ceeyar
8 July 2011
02:55 PM
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Wonderful Stuff. Superbly written. Worthy of any bestselling pot boiler... Revealing details as yet unknown. Most believable. Brilliant. Kudos!
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Apu
7 July 2011
08:34 PM
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Kudos to the Author Vinod K Jose. Though he published on International Fool's day (April 1, 2011) the article is just awesome. DMK patriarch Karuna is nothing but, evil perverted genius who saw his own rise and fall. Very painful at this age, may God have mercy on him. Amen !!!
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Madhu
7 July 2011
07:08 PM
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Superb article. Excellent compilation of information !! Hats off to the author.
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kjram
7 July 2011
06:24 PM
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Excellent article and very factual. Karunanidhi's strength is his weakness- his family. He has always disguised his self interest and family interest as a Tamil/Dravidian struggle and fooled the people of Tamilnadu for years. The fear of violence against his opponents had silenced a lot of people. Only Jayalalitha has the courage to take him on and in spite of her own stained record has upstaged karunanidhi time and again. The final nemesis will catch with karunanithi and his extended family and the party will be in tatters as failing health has made him vulnerable.
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MC
7 July 2011
06:17 PM
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Very well written! It is the people that needs to be blamed as we give them the liberty to do all the atrocities. The next gen DMK will never be united. Very nicely written article, Kudos to the author!!!!
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karthi
7 July 2011
05:02 PM
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While the article is good for a first time reader of TN politics, it has many flaws. Some of those who have made comments like N.Ram have benefited from Karunanidhi's regime and are now quoting otherwise. The name DMK stands for Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Instead, they should call it Dr. M. Karunanidhi's party. It is a party of Karuna's men, for Karuna's family and by Karuna.
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Chumma
25 June 2011
11:33 AM
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Very nicely written article. Every one right from the media till the common man is a victim to add his net worth. Karuna has done it remarkably well. He has also trained his family and left them his will of sharing the dirty politics. At least let the Tamilnadu Aam aadmi awaken by reading this article exposing a criminal.
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jj
22 June 2011
02:03 PM
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An amazingly well written article that gives clear insight into the age old family politics without boring the readers! kudos!
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selvie
8 June 2011
07:06 PM
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Just reading this article one can understand Tamil Nadu politics.
Excellent!
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Karthik
26 May 2011
08:48 PM
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Someone should make a movie purely based on this article......it would certainly be box office
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Vishal
26 May 2011
02:21 PM
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Killer Article..... Chronologically imperfect yet seamlessly enthralling....
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Harvinth
26 May 2011
10:18 AM
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Wonderful article. All a foreigner needs to know about DMK and Karuna is here.
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marty
25 May 2011
04:48 PM
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10000 % accurate protayal of the evil perverted genius
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Janakinath
25 May 2011
11:06 AM
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A stunning commentary on the DMK's growth and fall! I appreciate the author for frank views and detailed insights struck together in a beautiful documentary of sorts. I went through all articles compiled in a single shot and couldnt stop myself from congratulating the author for his remarkable acumen in writing! I cannot stop from searching and reading the other articles from the author :)
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