One who set the agenda for half a century
Accepting and adapting to the ground realities of a given situation was Karunanidhi’s greatest strength as a politician.
AFTER the results were announced formally in the 1967 elections, when the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) captured power in Tamil Nadu, senior DMK leaders, including C.N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi and V.R. Nedunchezhiyan, travelled from Chennai to Erode and got Periyar E.V. Ramasamy’s blessings. This happened just a couple of days before Annadurai formally took oath as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu along with his Cabinet colleagues. This was an interesting development because after floating the DMK and until 1967, not a single DMK leader had visited Periyar. So, it was only after 18 years that the DMK leaders met their mentor Periyar.
One of the interesting aspects of the history of not only the DMK but also the political personality of Karunanidhi was his inherent ability to accept and adjust to the ground realities of the politics of the day and enter into post-election alliances with any party.
The DMK was a constituent of the United Front government in New Delhi from June 1996 to February 1998. From June 1996 to April 1997, H.D. Deve Gowda was the Prime Minister and the DMK got the posts of one Cabinet Minister and two Ministers of State. When the Congress withdrew its support to Deve Gowda, the latter stepped down in April 1997. I.K. Gujral became the Prime Minister and the DMK was a constituent in that government too. The Gujral government was toppled in November 1997 by the Congress and fresh elections were held in February 1998 and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the Prime Minister. The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), with its 18 MPS, supported the NDA government and got a couple of Ministerial berths too. When Jayalalithaa, the AIADMK general secretary, withdrew support to the NDA government, the DMK, with its six MPS, voted in favour of the Vajpayee government. Yet, Vajpayee lost by just one vote on April 17, 1999.
Thus began the electoral understanding with the BJP. The DMK joined the NDA and contested the September 1999 Lok Sabha elections with the BJP. Plum portfolios such as Petroleum and Industry were allotted to the DMK. Murasoli Maran, T.R. Baalu and A. Raja became Ministers. But after the death of Murasoli Maran on November 23, 2003, the DMK quit the NDA on December 10, 2003. The DMK then joined the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the alliance swept the 2004 Lok Sabha elections by winning all 39 seats in Tamil Nadu and the lone seat in Puducherry (then Pondicherry).
In the first UPA government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the DMK got seven Ministerial berths. In the 2009 elections, too, the Dmk-congress alliance performed well by winning 28 seats in Tamil Nadu, and the DMK got seven Ministers in the UPA government’s second innings. But just a year before the Lok Sabha elections on March 21, 2013, the DMK’S Ministers resigned and the party presented a letter to the President stating that it was withdrawing support to the government. The DMK cited the letting down of Sri Lankan Tamils by the government in an important vote in the U.N. as the reason for the decision.
From 1996 to 2013, the DMK enjoyed power at the