Jab Sonia met Jaya

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 06 Feb 2010 12:18:31 AM IST
Last Updated :

A week ago, the UPA government postponed the auction of 3G spectrum till the next fiscal. This despite the fact that Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee was counting on collecting a cool Rs 35,000 crore to help tackle the massive deficit India has racked up (unless it comes down, he will lack monetary tools to fight inflation and will have no room for new Budget initiatives). Reports mention some hogwash about a delay by the army. The true story can be heard in a certain house in CIT Nagar, Chennai, wherein lives a powerful woman whose discretion is inversely proportional to her political ambitions for her daughter. She complains about how her second favourite politician, Telecom Minister A Raja, has been marginalised by the UPA government. The fact of the spectrum postponement seems to support her suspicions.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi probably saw the postponement coming. Earlier that same week, a tectonic shift in Tamil Nadu’s politics took place when bête noire J Jayalalithaa went to Delhi and met Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Karunanidhi apparently flew into a rage at his intelligence officials. Aren’t you supposed to be tapping her phone? he shrieked. She did not book a commercial flight but went by a chartered plane, was all they could mumble.

The old man is trying to put a brave face on things, but events are not going as planned. It started well enough: a comeback win in the Lok Sabha polls, M K Stalin’s anointment as deputy CM, the party bagging bypoll after bypoll… And then, an astrologer (yes, the Great Rationalist is not averse to sneaking a peek into his future) told Karunanidhi that his life span was, well, coming to a close this July. The CM has taken this prediction to heart. He knows that after he goes, Chemicals Minister M K Alagiri is not going to reconcile to Stalin as CM. He knows that Alagiri’s frustration will tear the party apart, since Alagiri is a far stronger political force than Stalin. Karunanidhi’s only hope for his family is to put them in power for another five years with Stalin as CM, and hope for the best.

So Karunanidhi has been preparing for an early election, one that may even take place mid-2010. As the last Lok Sabha elections proved that voters in the state can be bribed into re-electing incumbents, he recently summoned a state minister and a former Union minister, both of whom are reputedly resourceful, to go out and start “election work”. You might have noticed a lot of babies being named or their earlobes getting pierced by DMK politicians these days. These functions provide a good venue for the start of “election work”.

Yet Karunanidhi hoped the alliance with the Congress would continue; it gave him ministers at the Centre (though he did not reciprocate in the State) with lucrative portfolios, even if they embarrassed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. If you recall, Jayalalithaa made an overture to the Congress a year ago, before the Lok Sabha elections, asking the party to desert the DMK which was a “sinking ship”. A well-kept secret from those days is that Congress scion Rahul Gandhi responded to this overture. He even met emissaries — though not from the AIADMK — in Delhi to try and convert the overture into a formal alliance.

Sonia fortunately saved the day for Karunanidhi by turning down Rahul’s suggestion of aligning with Jayalalithaa, and she advised her son to focus on UP — a focus that paid rich political dividends.

The old man has puzzled over why Rahul wanted to dump him and hook up with Jayalalithaa. Some have told him that Rahul is unlike his sister Priyanka in many ways, one of them being his attitude to those who killed his father Rajiv Gandhi. While Priyanka was willing to meet Nalini, one of the assassins currently trying to have her life sentence commuted, in family discussions Rahul has reportedly differed. He could not be bothered about the people who killed his father. And he, it is said, dislikes Karunanidhi for the latter’s support to and defense of the killers. Perhaps that explains why Rahul did not call on the old man when he visited the state in September to help revitalise the Congress.

Sonia, however, stuck by Karunanidhi, and he was banking on this alliance continuing for the advanced state assembly elections. But something has made Sonia change her mind. The state Congress leaders may insist that nothing be read into the two ladies’ meeting; but for a man like Karunanidhi who eats, breathes and sleeps politics, the writing is on the wall. The meeting on the occasion of the Election Commission’s diamond jubilee in Delhi was engineered by Sonia herself, possibly through Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, who for years has been a Sonia confidante.

Sonia has obviously calculated that the UPA does not need the DMK’s 19 MPs, even if the AIADMK’s nine MPs don’t fully replace them. So it might happen that the Congress’ vote block will not help push DMK candidates over the victory line in various assembly constituencies. What will surely happen, though, is that the election commission will be extra vigilant during the assembly elections. Karunanidhi knows that might cramp Alagiri’s style.

After Sonia and Jayalalithaa met, the old man summoned his sons and explained to them what it meant. So what, Alagiri thundered, we can win these assembly elections on our own. Alagiri’s strategy apparently is not to focus on all 234 assembly seats in the state, but on only 150 winnable ones. He thinks the last Lok Sabha elections prove that with his new strategies, the DMK can win these many seats on its own. How can he be sure? He is said to believe he can think up 2,500 crore reasons for victory.

Karunanidhi may not be as sanguine as his son; a vigilant EC and an embittered Rahul Gandhi are both factors not to be trifled with. Yet what choice does he have? He is pretty much locked into an advanced election. All he can do is wonder why Sonia had a change of heart. Is it because his buddy is no longer the National Security Advisor? Is it because the headaches Sonia has been given ever since the powerful YSR Reddy died (first his son tried to pressure the party into making him CM, and now the Telangana debacle)? Does Jayalalithaa represent a more reliable ally than Stalin-Alagiri in 2014, when Rahul will contest to be the next PM?

Who knows? All that is certain is that 2010’s political event will not be Bihar’s assembly elections (which CM Nitish Kumar has under control) or the Maharashtra civic polls (the posturing for which is generating a lot of heat on TV and among middle-class twitterati, but not among voters). It will be the change in Tamil Nadu.