Chennai: In August 2018, the southern regional party DMK suffered a moment of reckoning. It was just after the death of Muthuvel Karunanidhi, an election-hardened political veteran in whose hands the party had remained putty until old age took away his oratory and clout. MK Stalin, neither as shrewd nor as eloquent as his father, was all but crowned but there remained a niggle: MK Alagiri, Stalin’s mercurial elder brother who had once held all the southern districts as though they were his estate and he their earl.
It was then — right after Karunanidhi’s death and when the DMK morale was at its lowest in decades — that Alagiri struck. In his trademark, terse statements he hinted the succession was not going to be easy. He announced a large rally towards his father’s grave on Chennai’s Marina beach, clearly a show of strength to his younger brother and also a barometer to check if the party would find his overture interesting.
It didn’t.
Along the swanky beach road and just feet from the pristine sands, Alagiri and his flock of supporters walked, but clearly it was not a draw for DMK supporters to ditch Stalin for Alagiri. The message to Alagiri from DMK was clear: We stand by Stalin.
Alagiri, later on, tried to have a meeting of loyalists at his base town Madurai. Not many turned up. And slowly, like many other forgotten sons of late politicians, Alagiri started living a quiet life.
Until now.
Again, as though his political fortune is one big sinusoidal wave, MK Alagiri is back in the limelight, making statements, denying political entries but clearly enjoying the perceived perturbation at the DMK camp that such speculation is deemed to be causing. Word got out (spread rather) that Alagiri was being wooed by the BJP. The “sources wishing to remain unnamed” within the BJP camp knew the drill:give no detail but kept seeding the idea that Alagiri could just be BJP’s southern trump card.
Alagiri Origins
MK Alagiri’s political stint began as early as 1980 when M Karunidhi sent his son to Madurai to manage DMK party organ Murasoli. Until then, Alagiri was working as a bank employee. Alagiri seized this opportunity given to him and became an influential leader of the southern part of the state. Alagiri also had a fiery side. Doubted or trifled with, he gives back more than he gets: he fielded rebel candidates against the DMK in 2001 after he was suspended for indiscipline, ensuring that the DMK candidate lost in the southern district. He was inducted again into the party later that year.
Sibling rivalry with MK Stalin was growing slowly but steadily. It reached a nadir in 2007, when Dinakaran, run by Karunanidhi’s grandnephew Kalanidhi Maran, had published results of a survey about the likely successor of Karunanidhi. The results were not pleasing for Alagiri: only 2 per cent of respondents thought him fit to succeed his father. Hours after the prints rolled out, the Madurai office of Dinakaran was ransacked by passionate goons in an assault that led to the death of three people.
Two years later, he rose again in the party and won the Thirumangalam bypoll (amid wide murmurs of cash for votes deemed to be the usher of such politics in the state) following which Karunanidhi made him the party’s South Zone Organising Secretary.
To ensure there was no overt signs of rivalry, Karunanidhi gave Alagiri a Lok Sabha ticket in 2009. Alagiri won the Madurai Lok Sabha constituency by a huge margin of one lakh and was made the Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers. All was well till 2013 when the DMK decided to pull out of the UPA over Sri Lankan Tamil issue
In March 2014, Alagiri was suspended again for anti-party activity, but this time, there appeared to be finality to the banishment. Karunanidhi, when he met the press to explain the action, gave the impression of a tired father rankled by an obstinate son.
Politically, will Alagiri be an influencer like he was during the early 2000s? Clearly, no easy answers but it does not seem like an easy climb for Karunanidhi’s son to be joining hands with the BJP, which is looking more saffron than usual in Tamil Nadu with its Vel Yatra and temple reclamation campaigns. The BJP, let’s be clear, has many trump cards up its sleeve, Rajinikanth being the bigger and the most potent of them. The party has been recently acquisitive in its approach, trying to rope in as many popular faces as possible across regions to take on the DMK. Alagiri’s history, his friendship with actor Rajinikanth, his anti-Stalin stance are enough reasons for the BJP to thrown in a bait. The question is: Will Alagiri take it? The bigger question: Even if he does, so what?
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