Beware of DMK Chief

Gimmicks of Karunanidhi

This blog is written by my friend and fellow blogger Mani Ramanathan and is first in the series of four he will be writing on the double standards of the political leaders from his home state of Tamil Nadu. This series kick starts with analyzing one of the oldest practicing politicians in India – Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi.

Visiting the constituency once in an election time; or raising a voice over an issue in assembly once in their life time; or uttering a beautiful fairy tale as their election agenda and invariably ending up writing a pathetic script after assuming the power; or forming an alliance with another party that shares no common agenda except capturing power; or doing anything that is corrupt, dishonest, cheating, hypocritical and disgusting to our wildest imaginations - none of the these are never ever new or unfamiliar to the politicians in India, specially to DMK Chief.

But what has been happening for the past few months in the political arena of Tamilnadu is shocking to say the least! The standard of politics has hit an all-time low. Let us see how the leaders of four major political parties of Tamil Nadu have recently turned virtually immeasurable on the fair scale of political ethics and standards.

Dr. 'Kalaingar' Karunanidhi is one of the senior most leaders with an awe-inspiring experience of close to 75 years in politics. He recently gave away a color TV - yeah, you read that right - to the poor citizens of Tamil Nadu. It is understandable as he always claims that he immensely believes in a poor person's happiness. But what followed his scheme was how amazingly his government struggled to provide adequate - not even twelve hours a day - electricity to the households of Tamil Nadu. I just wonder if those poor people got to ever see the colors in their TV at all.

Karunanidhi came up with another fairy-tale scheme of providing rice to the poor subsidized at just one rupee! He was very proud of this scheme as he could repeat the feat of erstwhile chief minister and his political mentor Mr. Annadurai who also rationed rice to the poor for one rupee four decades back! Simple economic theory would tell us one rupee 40 years back is worth eight rupees today while one rupee today is only worth ten paise forty years back! The scheme basically gives away rice for free! I am sure the only bottleneck those poor would have unfortunately ever faced in cooking the free rice is to find an affordable way to cook it!

His political pyrotechnics does not end there. The highly dramatic ousting of his grand nephew and then a cabinet minister Mr. Dhayanidhi Maran from his party and cutting of all the ties with him and his elder brother due to some political differences was famously enacted only to bring the Maran brothers back into the party as well as the family in a matter of few months. Now Mr. Maran is a DMK candidate in one of the three constituencies in Chennai for the forthcoming Loksabha election.

Historically, Karunanidhi has neither done anything significant for the cause of Sri Lankan Tamils nor maintained any healthy relationship with LTTE head Prabhakaran. He even famously fired Vaiko - now the head of MDMK - from DMK a decade ago accusing him of conspiring to kill him with the help of Prabhakaran.

As the on-going crisis of Tamils in Sri Lanka deepens and all the major parties of TN make a big propaganda of claiming their support for Sri Lankan Tamils, Karunanidhi sniffed an anti-DMK wave due to their alliance with Congress, which is accused of not supporting the Tamil cause in Sri Lanka. He got so desperate that he went on claiming Prabhakaran his close friend and LTTE not a terrorist organization, only to deny his claims the very next day as he realized the overtone of his statement and the controversy it created. As this move fired back, he got more desperate and went on calling a public strike for the cause of Srilankan Tamils. As he was still not sure of effectiveness of his moves, he went on an impromptu fasting and only to end it in the next six hours claiming that he got reliable information from Colombo that Sri Lankan government had announced a ceasefire. Later Sri Lankan officials denied the reports of ceasefire and clarified they have only stopped the use of heavy armories while DMK party leader was so emphatic about his personal triumph in helping the cause of Srilankan Tamils!

How one can ever get more desperate or become more dishonest or turn disgustingly more political to capture the power? Absurdity has not got just multiplied but exponentiated in his 75-year long political career. I am sure we have not seen the end of dramas enacted by Kalingar and more are expected as election date comes closer.

Thanks to http://www.sonyvellayani.com/2009/04/political-gimmicks-by-tamil-nadu.html