Opinion Awaiting the verdict

The TV channel named after him,Kalaignar,is under threat of closure or seizure. His 79-year-old senior wife,the majority shareholder in the channel,too is likely to be hauled over the coals. The advertising strapline for this channel used to be “Non-stop kondattam (celebration)!”

His elder son,a Union minister,has just been cleared of a murder charge,but is under fire and seems poised to lose some political muscle in south Tamil Nadu.

His younger son,so long and carefully groomed to be the next chief minister of Tamil Nadu,might never make it to the gaddi.

His younger grandnephew is a Union minister,and his elder grandnephew runs a multi-billion-dollar media empire that now has saturation control of the Tamil film industry. But the Sun Group hardly gives space to this master of political propaganda who had virtually internalised the Goebbelsian dictum that “propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with truth”.

His party might once again concede Tamil Nadu to his archrival — J. Jayalalithaa and the AIADMK — who might then set about on a political vendetta of unprecedented venom,making many supporters of the party run for cover,leading to internal tensions in its top echelons.

He himself might win the election to the assembly for a twelfth time on the trot,but the countdown for Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi has begun.

Seldom has a man,ripening in a few weeks into his 87th birthday,stared so comprehensively into the abyss,as the craftily constructed universe of power,wealth and mesmeric appeal around him unpacks itself in slow motion. Shortly before C.N. Annadurai,Mu.Ka.’s (Karunanidhi) mentor passed away in 1969,he had warned his ward,“Thambi,let it be known that the crown on our head is full of thorns.”

Tranquillity of age does not seem destined for this most versatile activist and architect of the past 44 years of unbroken rule by Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu — a longevity never acknowledged by upcountry media pundits habituated to gushing at the Left Front’s longevity in West Bengal.

After a momentous political career spanning seven decades — building the fortunes of the party now analogous with the symbol of the Rising Sun,with 57 of those years in the legislature of which 19 years he has been chief minister — the patriarch seems to have hit Sunset Boulevard on his home stretch. One bemoans the lack of a Cervantes or a Márquez to do justice to the narrative of this general in his labyrinth. He might well find solace in Gloucester’s lament from King Lear: “…’tis most ignobly done/ To pluck me by the beard.”

But political setbacks and corruption charges have never really fazed this warhorse. There has virtually been no time during his tenure at the top in Tamil Nadu when he was not facing corruption charges. His friend-turned-foe M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) split from the parent DMK after levelling charges of corruption on 18 counts. The Sarkaria Commission indicted him even. Indira Gandhi dismissed his ministry. Jayalalithaa punched him where it hurt. But Mu.Ka.,like Sisyphus,always rolled the stone back.

This is true also of charges of nepotism against him. He has played the dynasty card for long. Initially it was by successfully pulling in nephew Murasoli Maran to be his lieutenant. Then he unsuccessfully tried promoting his eldest son M.K. Muthu as a filmstar to rival MGR. Even though he had rhetorically claimed that the party was “a collective enterprise in which the cadres represented the betel leaf,the senior leaders the supari and he himself the lime — all of which mix together to form a consolidated red colour”,Mu.Ka. was for ever beset with suspicions about the loyalty of those around him. Recruiting the human resources available in his extended family was merely a way of engineering and ensuring personal loyalty.

Individual political longevity is one of the anathemas of true democracy. It is the original corruption that converts the idea of representation into a monarchical right,leading to many perversions in the system and legitimising nepotistic succession rituals and other symbols of power-retention. Mu.Ka. has been around too long holding on to power. He could have withdrawn a couple of decades ago and remained an ideologue and Bhishma-like figure in the party,constantly reviewing its aims,achievements and directions. He could have remained the catalyst that turns the paan red. Instead,by all accounts,he has presided over the comprehensive depoliticisation of Tamil society which has systematically corrupted the electorate,demeaned the bureaucracy,hijacked the judiciary,banalised the media and singularly stunted the Tamil language. It is a tenure that can be described in the words of Eric Hobsbawm,“A combination of intellectual nullity with strong,desperate mass emotion.”

Significant negative fallouts from successive Dravidian regimes presided over by Mu.Ka. and others include a reversal of its earlier rationalist programme to be replaced by mass mysticism and a critical distortion of everyday politics in the state by privileging “identity politics” and denying space to people’s movements and legitimate dissent. This administrative hardness has metamorphosed into an ugly police-state where the “lawlessness of law” has become the rule.

The only radical result Mu.Ka. can legitimately claim to have achieved is the cunning inversion of the original Dravidian ideal. The movement and the party began as secessionists,denying any space for “the North” or a “Northern language”. It took almost a decade for them to abjure secession to enter parliamentary politics (1957) and another decade to come to power. All the while,there was a cordon sanitaire,a chasm between the Centre and the state. Tamil Nadu was both physically and metaphorically in the margins.

Today,the periphery almost runs the Centre. It has wrested enormous package deals and leveraged itself as indispensable to the health of any ruling party at the Centre. In a sense,it has demonstrated the benefits of the “black-marketing of power”,a lesson Indian bourgeois democracy is unlikely to abandon in a hurry. Perhaps,Mu.Ka. need not feel despondent after all.

The writer is a Chennai-based cultural critic