The new government has barely begun to take shape, buoyed by an enormous election victory that putatively reduces the Congress’s dependence on a crew of squabbling allies. But the DMK has provided more than its share of drama, bitterly bargaining for portfolios and holding up the process for days.

This go-for-broke attempt to get his son M.K Azhagiri, daughter Kanimozhi, grand-nephew Dayanidhi Maran, and other senior party leaders like T.R Baalu plum ministerial posts reveals a larger dilemma about the DMK’s very future. Karunanidhi is the last remaining colossus of Dravidian politics, and after him, the DMK will have to deal with a deluge — as this scrabbling for seats indicates, power-sharing within the DMK is a fraught matter. Each of his wives and his daughter have pushed for various candidates, and Karunanidhi has to keep a complex calculus in mind as he seeks to keep the party united. By sending Azhagiri to Delhi, Karunanidhi hopes to defuse the sibling rivalry and ease the path for his younger son M.K Stalin to helm the party in Tamil Nadu.

In an election where the odds seemed stacked against it, the DMK has clawed its way to victory, becoming the party with the highest strike rate. But like Karunanidhi, the party itself looks like a shell of its former vital self, as the radical movement it gave a voice to seems like yesterday’s story as new vote banks are emerging and being exploited. It’s a sad irony that the Dravidian movement, which hinged on self-respect and the “right to go up in the social ladder unfettered and unshackled”, has been reduced to this crass family wrangle. Over the years, the party split and ideologically mutated, and the DMK itself is now a family-controlled affair, like most other Indian political parties where the game is rigged at birth.