Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her DMK counterpart Muthuvel Karunanidhi are addressing a public rally on Thursday at Chennai to seek votes for the candidates fielded by the parties for the May 16 Assembly election. This is their first joint rally in the last five years.
It was on April 5, 2011, Sonia Gandhi and Karunanidhi addressed an election rally from the same venue (Island Grounds, Chennai) soliciting votes from the general public for the DMK-Congress alliance in the Assembly election. But the people in Tamil Nadu did not heed the requests from both Sonia and Karunanidhi and voted for the AIADMK.
Since then the relation between Karunanidhi and Sonia Gandhi underwent many changes. The DMK, which was an indispensable ally of the Congress, withdrew its support to the UPA Government at the Centre in 2013 alleging that the Congress was indifferent to the problems faced by the ethnic Tamils in Sri lanka. But the real reason for the DMK’s withdrawal of support to the UPA Government was the ‘indifference’ of the Congress towards the corruption case against Kanimozhi, Karunanidhi’s daughter, in the 2G Spectrum case. Kanimozhi was arrested and was in Tihar jail for more than six months in connection with the 2G Spectrum case.
Karunanidhi was upset that the Congress failed to take note of his affection for Kanimozhi and the Grand Old Party did not do anything to bail out her from the Rs 1,70,000 crore scam. Following the parting of ways, the DMK and the Congress contested the 2014 lok Sabha elections separately and both the parties failed to win at least a single seat. Karunanidhi had approached the Congress in 2013 pleading with it to help his daughter Kanimozhi get elected to Rajya Sabha.
Early 2016 saw the DMK and the Congress patching up all indifferences and forging an alliance to fight the Assembly election. The 2016 Assembly election is crucial for 93 year old Karunanidhi, because he stands to get a permanent memorial near to Anna and MGR memorials at Marina Beach in Chennai only if the DMK wins the election and he becomes the Chief Minister.
But news coming from Madurai is not encouraging for the DMK. On Monday, hundreds of loyalists of MK Alagiri, Karunanidhi’s elder son, held a closed door meeting and decided to send a message to the party president asking him to bring Alagiri back to the party. If the DMK leadership fails to meet their demand, Alagiri’s lieutenants would work against the official DMK candidates in all the southern districts, according to Ml Raj, Opposition leader in the Madurai Corporation.
The DMK lost more than a dozen seats in the 2001 Assembly election because Alagiri and followers campaigned against them. The 2014 lok Sabha election turned out to be disaster for the Dravidian major as Alagiri did not campaign in the election.