Tehalka : How the K Family Colonised Tamil nadu

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Friendship. Feuds. Betrayal. Mammoth corruption. Karunanidhi started out as the idealist with the silver tongue. This is the breathless story of how his family led him astray. And turned Tamil Nadu into a family estate

ROHINI MOHAN reports

IN THE summer of 1991, in a crowded political rally in Patna, thousands stirred impatiently as a portly Muthuvel Karunanidhi, in dark glasses, white shirt and dhoti, walked up to the podium. Expecting the chief minister of Tamil Nadu and leader of the Dravidian movement to speak in nothing but chaste Tamil, people settled down to catch a few winks before the good Hindi stuff would begin. Unfazed, Karunanidhi adjusted the mike down to his height, cleared his throat and said in perfect English: “Before I proceed with my speech I would like to introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Karunanidhi. I am anti-national... I am a dangerous person to this country.”

ILLUSTRATIONS: SAURABH DEB

The shuffling stopped. Some people laughed nervously. Karunanidhi went on: “Dear brothers and sisters, these are the titles conferred on me by a great patriot... Who is that great patriot? He is none other than Rajiv Gandhi.” The rest of the speech was in Tamil, translated into Hindi by Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Rajmohan. Still, the audience listened, stunned.

Just a month before, Karunanidhi was accused of supporting the separatist LTTE in Sri Lanka. His government was dismissed and President’s Rule imposed, but that didn’t stop him from using the situation to pull a public punch. When news of his speech reached TN, people were gobsmacked for another reason. Karunanidhi knew English?!

The first step to being a politician in Tamil Nadu, it is widely acknowledged, is to learn stagecraft — the ability to spin words that shock, rouse, or sweep you off your feet when you least expect it. And Karunanidhi — or Kalaignar (The Talented) as his sobriquet goes — is largely responsible for this. A Tamil film scribe, he learnt the art of argument from the early Dravidian leaders Periyar and C Annadurai. His speeches were witty, provocative and without fail, wellattended. The DMKwas known to sell tickets at his political rallies, which mobilised cadres from across the state for more than 60 years.

Now 87, Karunanidhi has not lost a single election in his lifetime. And his success has ensured that fiery rhetoric is a pre-requisite for any Tamil political aspirant, from any party. If you step on stage, you’re expected to wow. It was the most tangible test, sometimes more crucial than the elections themselves.

Today, however, the most influential leaders in the DMK — Karunanidhi’s children — do not pass that test. Sons MK Stalin and MK Azhagiri, daughter Kanimozhi and grandnephew Dayanidhi Maran are all, at best, lukewarm orators. They fumble and drawl, and their lines, even when written by salaried staff, are like a bland meal to an audience accustomed to better.

Yet, in the last decade, especially in the current term of the DMK government, members of the first family have graduated from legislators to ministers, party members to party strategists, and most visibly, local politicians to national-level netas. The rules that bind every other politician in TN do not apply to them. It is not a mere matter of privilege, but of the kind of personal and financial takeover of a party and a state that breaks the limits of politics, and becomes simply about absolute control. Today, every time a person in Tamil Nadu switches on his television, reads the paper, buys groceries, purchases land, or watches a film, he has in some way engaged with one of Karunanidhi’s relatives. The family is inescapable. And its influence does not even depend on whether or not it is in power.

‘My name is Karunanidhi. I am anti-national. I am dangerous for this country.’ With those words, the leader had the crowd gripped

As the family’s stranglehold deepens, its furious infighting has become difficult to conceal. Karunanidhi’s daughter and Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi says, “The leader always put the party before the family.” (She, like all of Karunanidhi’s children, refers to her father as ‘the leader’.) But this reassurance, repeated by every DMK member, has begun to ring hollow.

On 13 April, wheelchair-bound Karunanidhi will perhaps contest his last Assembly election. And he goes into it bearing several burdens, including the debilitating 2G spectrum scam, the scandal of half his family being caught on tape negotiating Cabinet positions with a telecom lobbyist, the bitterness of a loveless marriage with the Congress, and a formidable opponent in the new-and-improved J Jayalalithaa. But first, Karunanidhi has to stop his sons Stalin and Azhagiri from going at each other’s throats.

PERHAPS THE starkest example of a family member whose phenomenal growth started completely outside democratic space is Azhagiri, Karunanidhi’s second son, now the Union chemicals and fertilisers minister. The 62-year-old contested his first election only in 2009, from the Madurai constituency. What looked like a political debut, however, was only a legitimisation of his iron grip over the southern districts for more than 30 years. In the recently leaked phone taps that exposed the 2G spectrum scam, TN Information Technology Minister Poongothai Aladi Aruna, speaking to telecom lobbyist Niira Radia, referred to Azahagiri as “a cut-throat politician”.

Azagiri

It all started with a banishment. In the early 1980s, Karunanidhi had sent Azhagiri, then a bank employee, to Madurai, which was his wife Kanthi’s home town. He was to run the Madurai edition of the DMK mouthpiece Murasoli, but was given no say in editorial decisions. He soon lost interest and directed his energies to other profitable ventures. Visibly, Azhagiri now runs a TV channel, a cable service provider (Royal Video), a wedding hall and a huge showroom of silk textiles. But covertly, he also controls the muscle power and moneybags that run the city — the contractors, brokers and land mafia. “Do you know how many stories I’ve written about people who’ve been threatened, harassed or killed after going to the police or court to challenge Azhagiri and his associates?” asks Idaya, a Maduraibased Tamil journalist. “After a point, I realised that there is no point in criticising the king in his own court.”

As Azhagiri unleashed his kangaroo courts, extortion rackets and henchmen on Madurai, election after election, the city’s largely working class population kept voting CPM candidates to the Lok Sabha, and the AIADMK to the legislature. “Azhagiri used to say that Madurai was being run by the wrong parties,” says TKS Elangovan, senior DMK leader and Rajya Sabha MP. In 1996, when the DMK swept the state, Azhagiri didn’t waste any time. “He used this opportunity to strengthen the DMK cadre in the south,” says Elangovan. When asked to elaborate on Azhagiri’s modus operandi, Elangovan grins broadly. “Hard work and charisma,” he says.

A long list of Election Commission notices to the Madurai wing of the DMK is less circumspect. It has found Azhagiri’s men guilty of dropping sealed envelopes with Rs. 500 notes in voters’ letter boxes (four notes for four voters) and his cable operators offering six months free usage to subscribers. Cartons of saris were found stored in the house of Azhagiri’s right-hand man, to be distributed at a rally. Weekly biriyani feasts were being held in slums, and women were being given cash coupons or pamphlets that could be exchanged for Rs. 100 at DMK offices. Before every election, goons were making door-to-door visits with sickles hanging down their backs. If anyone dared to protest, their land was confiscated and their vehicles destroyed.




MK AZHAGIRI, 62
The Union Chemicals and Fertilisers Minister and Karunanidhi’s second son is known to be a “a cut-throat politician”. He has never hid his ambitions and is likely to do anything in his power to succeed his father

Even with his reputation for violence, Azhagiri is the closest the DMK has to an organisational force as compelling as the patriarch. In Parliament last year, when he was scolded by Speaker Meira Kumar for speaking in Tamil, Azhagiri used the humiliating incident to his advantage in Madurai, the legendary seat of Tamil maanam (honour). In a public rally, Azhagiri asked, “Do I have to speak English to be your leader?” The audience, packed with his supporters, thundered “NO!” Azhagiri touched his hand to his heart. “Thank you,” he said. “Remember, I will always serve you as a true Dravidian leader.”

Through a crafty blend of harassment and self-promotion, Azhagiri secured three important Assembly byelections from Madurai Central, Madurai West and Thirumangalam for the DMK, and finally, a Lok Sabha seat for himself in 2009. The stocky, soft-spoken son, who once drove a Lambretta scooter and lived in a rented house, had grown into a giant who couldn’t be ignored. Not least, by his father.

KARUNANIDHI WATCHED Azhagiri’s growing ambition with trepidation. In Chennai, 450 km away from Azhagiri’s citadel, the patriarch was grooming his chosen successor: curly-haired Stalin, born three years after Azhagiri, and named after the Soviet leader who died four days after his birth.

At 5 am on 1 March this year, members of the DMK youth wing opened the gates of the YMCA grounds in Chennai to find close to 500 people inside, sleeping soundly on the red carpets. They had arrived the previous night in buses, trains, bikes and tempos from across Tamil Nadu with ribboned gifts for birthday boy Stalin, just a year shy of 60.

At 8 am, Stalin arrived with his wife Durga in a screeching convoy. A hyperactive band played Rajnikanth’s hit song Oruvan Oruvan Mudalali (There’s Only One Boss). Stalin waved genially at the screaming, whistling crowd. For a moment, he seemed to adjust his walk just so, timing it stylishly to the background music. (Stalin had acted in two aptly named movies in the 1980s — Ore Ratham (Same Blood) and Makkal Aanayittal (When People Decide). On stage now, Stalin stood as if in a trance, surveying the sweating mass of people ranged before him in their best silk clothing, holding pressure cookers and non-stick pans for their Ilaya Dalapathi (Young Lieutenant). Intuitively, he must know the adulation surging around him is for the favoured prince, not merely the deputy chief minister.

Stalin was born into politics, teethed in its manipulations, and knows he owes much to its drama. His resumé brims with prodigious political milestones. He went on his first election campaign when he was 14 and joined the DMK student wing while studying history at Presidency College, Chennai. His supporters never fail to invoke Stalin’s valiant imprisonment under MISA during the Emergency, but few mention that he was also investigated and let off for the alleged rape of a Tamil actress. A classmate who once scaled the Presidency College walls with Stalin, says he was a “brat who knew the influence of a powerful father”. He’s amazed at Stalin’s “pretence of sainthood as soon as he joined politics”.

The magic of the often-told myth is that it erases inconsistencies from public memory. For instance, Stalin wasn’t always the ‘natural successor’. As a teenager, he had watched his father promote the first son MK Muthu (from Karunanidhi’s first wife Padmavathy who died young) in Tamil cinema and politics, in a desperate bid to displace the stardom of actor and AIADMK crowd-puller MG Ramachandran (MGR). As an actor, Muthu imitated MGR to a fault, and made some eminently forgettable films. As a politician, he pulled stunts like arriving at election rallies on a white horse, but he became an alcoholic over time, and was found rambling on the streets. An embarrassment, Muthu was soon plucked out of the limelight.

When the DMK was kept out of power from 1977 to 1989 by the hypnotic MGR, the party lost several senior leaders and more than half its cadre to him. Karunanidhi realised the party needed a fresh infusion. It needed new, impressionable minds. It was in this low phase that Stalin was inducted into the DMK. The 20-something third son was tasked with reviving the fallen party. It was a desperate Karunanidhi’s let’s-try-everything move.

AS Panneerselvan, veteran journalist and once Sun TV chief, says Stalin brought in youth with such zeal it earned him the reputation of being a brat, an image he still lives with. What mattered, however, was that Stalin’s youth mobilisation gave the party urban acceptance. Most importantly, Karunanidhi was pleased. Stalin’s destiny was sealed.

 

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Stalin

DRIVING THROUGH Tamil Nadu, it is impossible to miss posters with Stalin’s beaming face. Hair dyed black, fingers raised in a victory sign, Stalin is always portrayed among a pantheon of Dravidian deities, designed to look part of the continuum. The leader standing tall on the YMCA stage, in fact, was engineered by a propaganda machine, by 20 years of orchestrated road shows, and strategic appearances alongside his father. His kingdom was created for him: he was simply anointed the successor. Riding on the early hype, Stalin became an MLA from Chennai, and the only elected Mayor of Chennai (the post is usually filled by appointment) for two terms. After 40 years of what he calls “waiting in the wings”, Stalin is now the deputy chief minister. And, at age 59, he still remains the party’s youth wing president.

In a moment of introspection, Stalin had admitted in an interview to a Tamil magazine that being the leader’s son had in fact “slowed his pace” in politics. He may have had an easy entry, he said, but he had spent years winning acceptance in the DMK. “It’s the price for establishing one’s own identity,” he explained.

Despite his reputation for violence, Azhagiri is the closest the DMK has to a potent force as compelling as the patriarch

But, though he has practically grown up in the DMK’s Anna Arivalayam office, few DMK members seem to know what Stalin is really like, as a person or a politician. “He is an organisational man like his father,” says Power Minister and old DMK hand Arcot N Veerasamy. “He has fully absorbed Kalaignar’s ideals,” says Veerapandi S Arumugam, agriculture minister and Karunanidhi’s friend. Anbazhagan, who has known Stalin since his childhood, says, “Suffice to say he’s inherited his father’s leadership qualities.” It’s hard to know where the image ends and the man begins. But does Stalin believe in the image himself?

“I’m pleased that people hold me in such high regard, but it is also a heavy responsibility,” is all Stalin would say, as I used the YMCA birthday celebration as a rare opportunity to speak to him. Despite eight attempts, he had refused to meet me for an interview. So when I wished him after standing for three hours in the queue with his supporters, I also asked him why he was avoiding the media. He smiled tiredly and waved me along, but only after replying: “Because you all ask me only one thing.”

The question that plagues Stalin, that makes him dodge the press, hasten through his appearances at family functions, and forces him into an ivory tower, has become louder as Karunanidhi ages: Who will win the succession war in the DMK?

Azhagiri and Stalin are both sons of Dayalu Ammal, whom Karunanidhi married after his first wife Padmavathy died of tuberculosis. Their rivalry is the stuff of folklore in Tamil Nadu. But Karunanidhi denies choosing a successor. In 1997, in a twohour- long speech, he said, “I am neither a king nor Stalin a prince. The DMK is not a ‘mutt’ for me to determine a successor.”

Every time Stalin is asked who will be the next DMK chief, he sticks to his father’s line: “The party will decide.” Azhagiri is less tactful. When a television reporter outside Parliament asked if he would be the next DMK head, he is known to have retorted: “Why not? Why can’t I!” It is the difference between the security of an heir and the indignation of a challenger.

Even apart from the leader’s approval, Stalin knows he has a headstart. He has more political experience, doesn’t have a violent past, and most senior DMK leaders have accepted his succession. When a 20-year-old Stalin was campaigning across TN, Azhagiri worked at a bank. It was only in the 1990s that he proved his political mettle by reinventing the DMK in the southern districts. Conscious of his newfound indispensability and miffed at being passed over for the top post, he began to kick up a storm. He hinted in Madurai that he might be the next thalaivar.

Annoyed by his son’s brazenness, in September 2000, Karunanidhi used his Murasoli column to direct the cadre to stay away from Azhagiri. In response, the latter’s rowdy supporters went on a rampage in Madurai, burning buses and breaking into government offices. A year later, Azhagiri threatened to resign with his followers if the DMK didn’t nominate his supporter Kaverimanian (instead of Stalin’s choice Trichy Siva) to the Rajya Sabha.

The sibling rivalry began to cost the DMK electoral seats. In the 2001 Assembly election, Azhagiri’s men allegedly worked against the DMK candidates, defaming them and harassing their supporters to abstain from voting. Two candidates lost to the AIADMK. Azhagiri was also arrested for the murder of former minister and DMK leader T Kiruttinan, who was close to Stalin.

“The natural successor propaganda has been going on for 20 years, and the cadres are set to receive Stalin as their leader,” says Elangovan. “When someone challenges what has become common sense, there are horrible consequences.”

MK STALIN, 59
The deputy chief minister has been groomed for long as the chosen successor. He has more political experience, doesn’t have a violent past, and most senior DMK leaders find him acceptable

IN A state where you can identify the party a man belongs to by the border of his dhoti, cadre loyalty is precious. In the last decade, the electorate has been split largely in three ways — between the DMK+, AIADMK+, and to a smaller but significant extent, the Congress. If the familial discontent within the DMK is allowed free expression, it will tear the DMK’s vote-base asunder. “Different leaders will start creating their own sub-DMKs,” says Elangovan. “That’s no way to go into an election. That’s no way to run a party.”

A single deified leader is central to both TN politics and its social psyche. The formula is as old as the Dravidian parties themselves. “To combat another party, one leader has to be glorified to sustain the cadres’ motivation,” explains writer and dramatist Gnani. “You build an aura around the leader, and build a chasm between him and the cadre, so that they are not loyalists, but devotees.”

The DMK has formidable rivals at this game. MGR was the master of the larger-than-life image. His films evoked a powerful idea: MGR as the moral hero who protected women, demolished upper-caste villains, and was committed to the Dravidian ideals of love for Tamil and unity of the downtrodden. In real life too, he was considerate with party members and made sure he was seen giving away wads of money to a driver for a daughter’s wedding, or an old woman who needed an operation. Most people voted for — and still vote for — MGR, not the AIADMK.

Jayalalithaa was quick to understand this. She too is called Amma (Mother), Thanga Thalaivi (golden leader), and Puratchi Thalaivi (revolutionary leader). Ridiculed after MGR’s death for being his Brahmin mistress and a lowly actress, the soft-spoken young woman trained herself to become an inaccessible autocrat. She encouraged even elderly party members to fall at her feet, and beat her auditor with slippers when she was charged with corruption. She is infamous for her mistrust and insecurity — for the longest time, she was rumoured to wear a bullet-proof jacket. She also wears a cape, an unsubtle cue for how she wishes to be seen: a super-heroine in politics.

Karunanidhi has played leader to the hilt too, but he does not play hero. “He has cast himself as a family head, a wise patriarch who is a symbol of everything the party is,” says Gnani. In that sense, he has won a more complex commitment from his supporters than MGR had or Jayalalithaa.

The transformative energy of the Dravidian movement has long been frittered away, but Karunanidhi was bred in it. The idea of a welfare state, gender sensitivity, a peoplecentric government, the questioning of oppressive religion and caste hierarchies survive in his soaring verse and electoral rhetoric. It’s no surprise then that Karunanidhi is still the biggest vote catcher the DMK has. Neither Stalin nor Azhagiri manage to draw the thousands that the ageing leader, now permanently on a mechanised wheelchair, still can. Today, despite the show of party democracy, Karunanidhi is the party. It follows that if he chooses to nominate an heir, at least until he’s alive, the party will stick with the decision.

“If he could remain CM in his next life, Karunanidhi would choose that over everything else,” jokes political commentator Cho Ramasamy. “But since he is an atheist, he has no choice but to pick a successor.”

The revolutionary founder of the Dravidian movement, EV Ramasamy or Periyar, often said that children make a politician selfish. “The most influential and feted leaders in Tamil Nadu, or the erstwhile Madras Presidency, did not have children,” says Cho referring to Periyar, DMK’s C Annadurai, Congress’ K Kamaraj and AIADMK’s MGR. Today, Karunanidhi’s rival Jayalalithaa too is unmarried and issueless. “It can’t be a coincidence that the only politician with three wives and children is the one who has monopolised the state for personal profit,” he says.

Cho might be exaggerating the moral force of childlessness, especially when Jayalalithaa has been investigated for over six cases of massive corruption. Still, there’s no denying that Karunanidhi today presides over the most cacophonous power battles Tamil Nadu has ever seen. A few years ago, this started pushing the otherwise astute patriarch to make some astoundingly bad decisions. And every time he has allowed personal relationships to subsume the ideology he represents, he has lost personal credibility. The rebel has morphed merely into the father.