By Papri Sri Raman, IANS
Chennai : He has waited 42 long and patient years to be where he is today, a de facto chief minister of Tamil Nadu.
He was named Stalin as father Muthuvel Karunanidhi – an ambitious and rising Dravidian politician – was an admirer of the Russian Joseph Stalin who died in 1953, the year the Indian Stalin was born.
Stalin’s first political lessons came in 1967 – the year the DMK ousted the Congress party from Fort St George, the state secretariat, and rode to power. The 14-year-old got to campaign for his cousin Murasoli Maran, contesting a Lok Sabha seat.
By 1973, Stalin was voted into the general committee of the DMK. The next five years was a fiery political initiation for the 20-year-old.
Charismatic actor-turned politician and the DMK’s main vote getter, M.G. Ramachandran, had quit the party in 1974 accusing Karunanidhi of corruption and floated the AIADMK. “What they (Karunanidhi and company) do best is lie, give false accounts, take money,” MGR told the New York Times in 1974.
It is also said that Karunanidhi’s attempts to promote his eldest son Muthu (born out of a previous marriage) as a film star and competitor to MGR also led to MGR’s decision.
The year 1976 saw young Stalin in jail during Indira Gandhi’s emergency regime. Karunanidhi’s government had been dismissed before that on corruption charges. Karunanidhi was beaten in jail, and DMK folklore has it two DMK activists died trying to save the ‘thalaivar’ (leader).
In 1977, when emergency ended, the DMK was in a shambles and MGR’s AIADMK won the assembly elections.
Stalin was put in charge of getting the DMK back on its feet, not Vaiko (V. Gopalasamy), another rising DMK politician of the time, thus triggering another of history’s heartburns.
Muthu had for a while flirted with the AIADMK in the 1980s, making Karunanidhi drop him forever from his life.
DMK watchers still remember the next 10 years when people continued to elect the AIADMK. It is said that it was Stalin’s hard work that brought the DMK to power in 1989, two years after MGR died.
By 1994, orator Vaiko was ousted from the DMK, totally clearing the way in the party for Stalin.
It was also during this time that Karunanidhi banished his older son M.K. Azhagiri (like Stalin, also Dayaluammal’s son) to Madurai for dissidence, away from Chennai where all eyes needed to be focused on Stalin, by now openly called “the heir apparent”.
Stalin was the son who had returned the father to the chief minister’s throne. Karunanidhi quoted a verse from the ethical literature ‘Thirukkural’ to say: “The biggest favour a son can do to his father is make others say, ‘How fortunate a father he is to have a son like this.’ Stalin has done me this favour.”
In 1996, Stalin became the 22nd mayor of Chennai city, built by the British nearly 400 years ago. He whizzed in on flyovers as a solution to the city’s traffic woes and built at least nine during his tenure. This led to corruption charges by the successor AIADMK regime, which jailed him along with father Karunanidhi and the ailing Murasoli Maran in June 2001.
This arrest helped reunite Azhagiri and Stalin, with mother Dayalu playing an important role. However, in 2003, Azhagiri was arrested for the murder of a DMK politician who was a Stalin supporter, P.T. Krittinan.
In the May 2004 parliamentary elections, Murasoli Maran’s son Dayanidhi Maran was chosen a candidate for the Lok Sabha. Stalin managed his poll campaign.
The DMK too came back to rule in May 2006 — again, it is said, due to Stalin’s efforts.
He was rewarded with the post of a minister in the fifth Karunanidhi government. Azhagiri was released from jail.
The party has also made a concerted effort in an image-makeover for Stalin, getting him pose for huge cardboard cutouts in different dresses.
However, the ‘veshti’-clad, Tamil speaking, hesitant Stalin made a poor contrast to the globe-trotting, English speaking, high-profile and witty Maran junior.
When the Maran family paper “Dinakaran” ran an opinion poll survey result in June which said that people preferred Stalin to Azhagiri as chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi used the opportunity to oust Dayanidhi from the DMK, making Stalin and Azhagiri the sole inheritors of his political power.
By early November Karunanidhi was telling his audience: “… I also want to retire….”. He also wrote “Make way for the Young” in the party organ “Murasoli”.
Ahead of an important DMK meet in Tirunelveli district, scheduled for Dec 15-17, the buzz is that the patriarch will hand over the baton to M.K. Stalin, officially creating a post of deputy chief minister.