The Last Lear

Can the aging patriarch of Indias most

fractious political dynasty hold his family
togetherand continue to cling to power in
Tamil Nadu?
By VINOD K JOSE | 1 April 2011

ONE: THE BROKEN ESTATE

ON THE SCORCHING FRIDAY AFTERNOON of 11 May 2007, at
Chennais Island Grounds, Muthuvel Karunanidhi had some important
business to settle privately with Sonia Gandhi.
Gandhi, the Congress party president, had come to Chennaialong with
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and two former prime ministersto join
the celebrations marking Karunanidhis 50th anniversary as a legislator,
an unprecedented milestone in Indian politics. But on this humid summer
day, as thousands of his followers from across the state converged on the
burning sands to celebrate their leaders longevity, the then 83-year-old
chief minister of Tamil Nadu had something else on his mind.
It was like a thorn for him, and he had to remove it with as little damage
as possible, said an associate of Karunanidhi who described the
conversation to me.
Minutes before the golden jubilee celebrations began, Karunanidhi took
Gandhi aside. Daya has to be dropped, Karunanidhi said, referring to his
grand-nephew Dayanidhi Maran, then the Union minister for
communications and information technology. Hes failed us.
Dont worry, she assured him. Your wish will be fulfilled. The United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government, then as now, required
the support of Karunanidhi and his party, the Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (DMK). Gandhi, as chairperson of the ruling coalition in the Lok
Sabha, was unlikely to take issue with his request.
Dayanidhi Maran, then 41 years old, had served three years as the
communications minister, a plump portfolio in New Delhi that Karunanidhi
had personally requested for him. Maran quickly became the sophisticated
face of the DMK in the capital: he spoke in fluent English to the national
press and wore designer shirts and trousersa marked departure from
the dhoti-clad DMK politicians who had preceded him.
But back home, tensions had been rising between Karunanidhi and his
grand-nephewsDayanidhi and his elder brother, Kalanithi, who had
leveraged party connections to build a powerful media empire that
included Sun TV, Indias largest television network. Karunanidhi was
convinced that his own family had been shortchanged by Kalanithi Maran,

who had aggressively bought back the familys shares in Sun TV for well
under the market value before taking the company public in 2006. And
now, Karunanidhi believed, the Marans were intent on fomenting discord
among his own children, his chosen political heirs.
The spark that finally led Karunanidhi to take action had been an opinion
poll published in the Maran brothers newspaper Dinakaran on 9 May
2007, asking who should be Karunanidhis successor. Seventy percent of
the respondents chose Karunanidhis younger son and the current deputy
chief minister, MK Stalin; his elder son, MK Azhagiri, placed a distant
second, with a meagre two percent. (A few days earlier, the paper had
published another instalment of the survey, which had judged Dayanidhi
Maran as the most efficient Tamil minister in Delhi, overtaking even the
Congress partys P Chidambaram, then the Union finance minister.)
Karunanidhi believed that the Marans had no mass base of their own, and
that they were using their media (and money) to promote Dayanidhi
Maran and set off a debilitating war of succession between Azhagiri and
Stalin. Azhagiris own supporters seemed to agree: on the morning the
poll was published, an angry mob of about 50 people attacked the
Dinakaran office in Madurai, Azhagiris home base. They threw petrol
bombs and set the newsroom on fire; two journalists and a security guard
were burned alive. Kalanithi Marans deputy and the chief operating officer
of the Sun TV Network, RM Ramesh, told the press that the attack was
orchestrated by Azhagiri himself, and that they had evidence to prove it.
Karunanidhi ordered an investigation, but his first move was to axe the
Marans.
I angrily told Kalanithi Maran and Dayanidhi Maran to stop the
publication of the surveys, Karunanidhi later said. But they ignored him.
After his private chat with Sonia Gandhi, Karunanidhi moved at lightning
speed, ensuring that there would be no opportunity for resistance. Within
two days, he convened the 148-member DMK administrative committee.
The party passed a unanimous resolution to remove Dayanidhi Maran
from the Union Cabinet in Delhi for violating party discipline, forcing him
to resign.
In the months after Marans removal, the political and familial soap opera
in Tamil Nadu grew into something like open warfare: to rival the Marans
Sun TV, Karunanidhi launched his own television channel, Kalaignar TV
(named after the honorific given to him by his supporters: Kalaignar
translates as scholar of the arts); to fight the Marans cable distribution
monopoly in Tamil Nadu, the chief minister floated a state-owned
distribution company, the Arasu Cable Corporation. In an emotional
column published in November 2008 in the DMKs party newspaper,
Murasoli, Karunanidhi publicly accused his grand-nephews of attempting
to create trouble in my family and cheating him in the buy-back of Sun
TV shares.
And then, after a year and a half of fighting, the family patched up almost

overnight, putting their good relations on display by giggling and smiling

together in a series of photographs released by the Tamil Nadu
governments press bureau. Nobody knows for certain what precipitated
the happy reunion, said to have been brokered by Karunanidhis son
Stalin and daughter Selvi. But a hint comes from the leaked Niira Radia
tapes, in which the corporate lobbyist tells former Hindustan Times editor
Vir Sanghvi that the Marans paid `6 billion to one of Karunanidhis two
wives, Dayalu Ammala sum, party sources told me, intended to
compensate Karunanidhi for the undervaluation of his familys Sun TV
shares several years earlier.
The split between Karunanidhi and the Maransand their eventual, if
fragile, reunionmay seem like ancient history for the fractious DMK. But
it neatly encapsulates almost every aspect of the party under
Karunanidhi: family rivalries, big money, television power, greed, violent
reprisal and outsized influence in Delhi.
Today Dayanidhi Maran is back in the Union Cabinet as the minister for
textiles; his brother Kalanithi now sits at the helm of Asias most
profitable television network. Karunanidhis elder son, Azhagiri, has been
cleared of charges relating to the murder of a former DMK minister, and
sits in the Union Cabinet as minister of chemicals and fertilisers. But the
troubles of family and party have only grown: Karunanidhis favorite ward,
Andimuthu Raja, who was forced to resign as Union communications
minister late last year, now sits in a Delhi jail, accused of presiding over
the biggest scam in the history of Indian politicsthe giveaway of 2G
mobile spectrum believed to have defrauded the government of billions, if
not trillions, of rupees. Karunanidhis two wives, who have no source of
income apart from their husband and children, are accused of having
amassed fortunes in black money and playing key roles in crooked
dealmaking. And the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has
interrogated his poet daughter, the Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi, over a
suspicious `2.14-billion transfer in connection with the spectrum scandal.
As the scams and allegations surrounding Karunanidhi and his family
multiply at a rate so rapid its hard to keep track of them all, the grand
patriarch of Dravidian politics will face the most difficult test of his six
decades in public life when Tamil Nadu voters go to the polls on 13 April
to elect a new state government.
Karunanidhi built his political career on the foundation of his skills as a
screenwriter and orator, but the man who has scripted 77 films and
written more than 200,000 printed pages now fears a dramatic climax
over which he may have no controlone that would see him ejected from
office with his reputation in tatters, his family deprived of their political
inheritance, and his party splintered into warring factions.
Publicly, Karunanidhi is still projecting an image of confidence and selfassurance, but as the fallout from the 2G scam continues to strain his
relationship with the Congress, Indias most experienced politician has
begun to confess his anxieties to a handful of his closest friends. Without

realising it, he tells them repeatedly, Sonia Gandhi is doing exactly what
Indira Gandhi did to me. Now 87, confined to his motorised wheelchair,
uncertain of whom to trust, the elderly DMK kingpin has begun to feel
increasingly helpless, party insiders told me. And this, they say, only
makes him angrier and angrier.
IN THE SMALL VILLAGE OF THIRUKKUVALAI, 300 kilometres south of
Chennai and nestled not far from the sea, endless fields of rice paddies
seem to stretch to the horizon in every direction. Palm and tamarind trees
shade the roads, and the modest brick houses are fenced by bamboo
panels or hibiscus bushes.
It was here that Karunanidhi was born in 1924, into a poor Isai Vellalar
family, members of a temple-dependent caste that traditionally played the
Nadaswaram, a south Indian wind instrument. With very little income
from his caste vocation, Karunanidhis father, Muthuvelar, took to singing
ballads and practicing vaidyatraditional medicine. Karunanidhi, the
familys first son, born after two girls, was treated with special reverence
at home: at an early age, his father introduced him to the epics, oral
stories and music.
The house where Karunanidhi was born is now a museum celebrating his
life in politics, and is filled with photographs of his family and of
Karunanidhi rubbing shoulders with everyone from the Pope to Indira
Gandhi. The pictures have no captions; their contents were described to
me by the museums middle-aged curator, who smelt distinctly of hooch.
Outside, the voluminous tales of Thirukkuvalais villagers presented a
more sprawling portrait of Karunanidhi; it was difficult to walk more than
a few metres without coming across someone willing to share a memory
or a story that had become local folklore, whether flattering or
scandalous. Most of these stories would be impossible to verify, and their
tellers were unanimously unwilling to be quoted talking about the chief
minister, especially if the story in question involved a female relative of
Karunanidhi. But the villagers were unquestionably proud of the fact that
a boy who had once run through these streets had risen to become the
most powerful man in the state.
The daughter of the man who taught music to Karunanidhi at one of the
village temples, now 80 years old herself, remembered him as a sensitive
boy. He used to come to us, and cry and cry, she told me. He could not
take my fathers scolding.
It was his music classes, however, that gave Karunanidhi his first practical
lessons in politics, and not merely because of his teachers scolding: the
classes mirrored the rigid caste hierarchies of the era; Karunanidhi was
not allowed to wear cloth to cover his upper body and was restricted to
learning only a few songs.
His musical training did not last long, but the lessons he learnt created a
fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas of EV Ramasamy, the Tamil

reformer known to his admirers as Periyar (the great one). At 14,

Karunanidhi became a student activist in Periyars Self-Respect
Movement, which proposed a militant awakening of the Dravidian
peoplecomposed of non-Brahmin southernersagainst the hegemony of
Aryan north Indians and their Brahmin representatives in the south.
Periyar had been active in the Indian National Congress, but came to
regard it as an upper-caste north Indian party that was insufficiently
committed to social reforms like the elimination of caste hierarchies and
the uplift of lower-caste Hindus. Under the broad banner of social
justice, the Dravidian ideology that he espoused was influenced by
rationalism, communism and the ancient Tamil epics, and called for the
creation of an independent nation in South India, which he called Dravida
Nadu.
When Hindi was introduced as a compulsory language in schools in 1937,
Periyar inspired a generation of young Tamil students into the streets to
protest. They included Karunanidhi, who enacted agitprop dramas, gave
speeches and brought out a handwritten magazine. Periyar and his
lieutenant, CN Annadurai, who later became the first non-Congress chief
minister of Tamil Nadu, took notice of the fiery teen activist in
Karunanidhi and encouraged him.
Karunanidhi failed in his 10th standard exams and moved to Coimbatore,
where he made a living writing scripts for professional theatre groups. But
his skills as an orator and polemicist had captured the attention of Periyar
and Annadurai, who asked him to address public gatherings and later
appointed him the editor of their Dravidar Kazhagam party magazine,
Kudiyarasu, while allowing him to continue working part-time in theatre.
When Periyars movement split in two after Independence, Karunanidhi
joined the exodus led by Annadurai and helped found the DMK in 1949 as
its first treasurer. By the early 1950s, Karunanidhi had become something
of a celebrity in his own right: he had graduated from theatre to the
cinema, and his scripts had produced a few blockbusters. The most
famous of these, Parasakthi (1952), was both melodrama and political
tract; it made Karunanidhi famous, and cemented the DMK strategy of
presenting its ideology to the masses through films, which would continue
to pay dividends in the decades that followed. The hero, a poor, apolitical
Tamil, is drawn into politics after suffering at the hands of ruthless north
Indian moneylenders, local Brahmin leaders, and an insensitive and
ineffective government; by the films end, he has embraced the Dravidian
awakening promised by the DMK as the only way forward.
When the party contested its first elections to the state assembly in 1957,
Karunanidhi was among the 13 DMK legislators elected. At the time, the
Congress enjoyed a massive majority, but within 10 years the tide had
shifted irreversibly toward the DMK, thanks in part to the intense
agitations that shook the south over the proposed imposition of Hindi. In
1967, the DMK became the first non-Congress party to win an outright
majority in the state elections. The Congress has never regained political

control of Tamil Naduthe DMK and its rival Dravidian party, the All India
Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), have controlled the state
ever since.
While Annadurai was the face of the DMK as its much-beloved leader,
Karunanidhis political skills had become critical to its successes.
Annadurai brought the names together, but there was no one to run the
party. Karunanidhi did that job, says AS Panneerselvan, who is writing a
biography of Karunanidhi. He became a master at mobilising crowds,
organising party cadres and, most importantly, raising funds.
After losing to the Congress in 1957 and 1962, the DMK had determined
that Dravidian ideology alone would not deliver victory in 1967; the party
would need money power as well. As the DMKs treasurer, Karunanidhi led
the effort, telling Annadurai that he would raise `1 million, which
Annadurai thought impossible. When Karunanidhi not only met but
surpassed this targetraising `1.1 milliona stunned Annadurai dubbed
him pathinoru latcham, Mr Eleven Lakh, at a public rally in Madras. After
the DMK defeated the Congress and Annadurai became chief minister,
Karunanidhi was appointed minister for public works and highways, the
third-ranking job in the state cabinet.
WHEN ANNADURAI DIED of cancer after only two years in office,
Karunanidhiwith the help of the matinee idol and DMK member MG
Ramachandran, known to all simply as MGRmanoeuvred his way past a
more senior party colleague and into the chief ministers office, and then
led the party to a convincing victory in snap elections in 1971.
The following year, however, MGR split from the DMKafter being denied
a cabinet post, among other slightsand launched his own party, the
AIADMK. Despite MGRs incredible popularity among the people of Tamil
Nadu, who revered him as no less than a god, Karunanidhi dismissed the
threat from his former friend and comrade. Without sacrifice and a party
structure, he will achieve nothing, an overconfident Karunanidhi
pronounced.
It was a boast he would soon regret. MGR continued to build his legend,
playing the infallible melodramatic hero in a series of blockbuster films. In
its first election in 1977, his party crushed the DMK so decisively that
Karunanidhi would remain out of power for as long as MGR was alive. It
was only after MGR died in 1987 and the AIADMK was divvied up between
MGRs wife, Janaki, and his young deputy, Jayaram Jayalalitha (now
known just as Jayalalithaa) that Karunanidhi was able to ease back into
office in 1989. Even as Jayalalithaa consolidated her iron control over the
AIADMK, he remained confident. How would a Brahmin woman, he said,
knowing nothing about Dravida life, be a threat to me in Dravida Nadu?
But his bravado would fail him again, as Jayalalithaa emerged as MGRs
heir among his most devoted constituency: women and the poor.
Karunanidhis second fall from power began with a dramatic episode in the
Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly on 25 March 1989. As Karunanidhi, who

was also the state finance minister, stood up to read out his budget
speech, a shout came from the opposition benches: a Congress MLA,
Kumari Anandan, interrupted him and announced that the police had been
harassing Jayalalithaa, then the leader of the opposition, who quickly
spoke up in protest as well. The chief minister used the police to harass
me, Jayalalithaa said. They tapped my phones. The House should
discuss the matter at once.
Before Karunanidhi could continue, the assembly erupted in chaos.
People charged with criminal acts should not be allowed to present the
budget, Jayalalithaa screamed into the microphone. The head of the
government is corrupt!
Karunanidhi issued a snide retortwhich has been struck from the
assembly records because it was unparliamentarywhich made
Jayalalithaa even more furious. As one of her MLAs rushed towards
Karunanidhis desk, he lost his balance and fell; the DMK legislators
dismantled the microphones and threw them at the opposition members,
who flung slippers and books in response; one of Jayalalithaas MLAs tore
the budget papers in half.
The speaker brought the proceedings to a close and adjourned the House,
but it wasnt over. As Jayalalithaa was making her exit, the DMK minister
for public works, Durai Murugan, one of Karunanidhis favourites to this
day, obstructed her path, clutching at her sari as she cried for assistance.
This incidentwith its echoes of the shameful disrobing of Draupadi in the
Mahabharatawas the beginning of the end for Karunanidhi. Jayalalithaa
publicly vowed to never step foot inside the House until conditions are
created for a woman to attend the Assembly with dignity. The media
condemned Karunanidhi and his men as uncouth and rowdy. After the
Centre dismissed the DMK government in early 1991, Jayalalithaa
trounced Karunanidhi in the elections in Juneheld in a charged
atmosphere only weeks after Rajiv Gandhis assassination in the state
taking 224 seats and holding the DMK down to the single digits with seven
seats.
In the two decades since, the two rivals have traded power every five
years. Both Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa have been accused, and tried, in
numerous major corruption cases, but they have managed to twist the
systembeing its architectsto their own advantage, watering down the
cases against them after returning to power and taking advantage of their
close relations with the national government in New Delhi. (No
government at the Centre has been formed without the support of either
the DMK or the AIADMK for the past 22 years.)
These two major Dravidian parties, both born of Periyars Self-Respect
Movement, have come to entirely dominate Tamil Nadu politics. But their
formative Dravidian ideological tenetssocial justice, anti-caste
hierarchism, Tamil nationalismhave faded entirely. All that remain today
of their original agenda of Dravidian empowerment are gratuitous

handouts: one kilogram of rice for `1; or more recently, free colour TVs.
Karunanidhi, who once devoted his life to his partys Dravidian ideology
and took great pride in having risen to his position of power after arriving
in Chennai with nothing but a steel trunk, now sits atop the richest and
most influential south Indian political dynasty. The ideological rhetoric
that brought the DMK to power has been largely discarded; it is now
useful, clearly, only for rallying the masses at election time and for
defending his family and party against charges of corruption.
TWO: THESE ARE BAD DAYS
KARUNANIDHI MADE ONE OF HIS RARE VISITS TO DELHI this
January, two months after A Raja had been forced to resign as Union
telecom minister. The DMKs influence and power at the Centre had sunk
to an all-time low. The Congress had abandoned its half-hearted attempt
to diminish the loss to the treasury following the 2G scam, and had begun
to cite the compulsions of coalition politics as the excuse for its failure to
take swift action against Raja when the scam came to light.
For Karunanidhi, who despises the Delhi media and its coverage of his
family, only serious business merits a trip to the national capital. His
infrequent visits are usually at times of crises or opportunity, as in 1980,
when he engineered the dismissal of MGRs government, and in 2008,
when he lent critical support to the Congress as it struggled to stay in
power after the India-US nuclear deal.
Not that the DMKs distress was evident on the capitals streets. If
anything, the road leading to Tamil Nadu House, in central Delhi, looked
like a street rally in Tamil Nadu: tall cutouts of Karunanidhi, Stalin and
Azhagiri lined the pavements, and jam-packed party workers, dressed in
white shirts and dhotis and waving black-and-red DMK flags, chanted
slogans in anticipation of Karunanidhis arrival. Shouts of Thamizhagam
Vaazhikai, Kalaignar Vaazhikai! (Long live Tamilhood, Long Live
Kalaignar!) filled the air.
Karunanidhi arrived, accompanied by his daughter Kanimozhi, in a
customised Toyota Alphard, which pulled right into the lobby of TN House.
An automatic lift in the MPV lowered Karunanidhis motorised wheelchair
onto the floor, and he rolled toward the flashing cameras and extended
microphones of the assembled journalists.
Karunanidhi has rarely granted full-length interviews to the national
media; the last such occasion was in 2007, when he spoke to the Indian
Express editor Shekhar Gupta, with Kanimozhi as his translator, on an
awkward episode of Guptas NDTV programme Walk the Talk. Thanks to
his critical support for the Congress over the nuclear deal, Karunanidhis
influence in Delhi was then at its peak, and he spoke to Gupta from a
position of considerable strength.
As a rule, though, Karunanidhi never takes more than two questions from
a press gaggle, which he answers invariably in one sentence, if not one

syllable. His January visit was no exception, and he gave curt, sanitised
responses to the two questions that he entertained: one about why he
had come to Delhi, the other about his choice of allies in the upcoming
elections.
I lingered after Karunanidhi wheeled into the elevator and the cameras
departed. DMK leaders congregated in clusters of threes and fours in the
corridors and staircases while Karunanidhi conferred privately with his
innermost coteriethe state law minister, Durai Murugan; the former
Union minister for shipping, road transport and highways, TR Baalu; and
Kanimozhi. They were devising a strategy for two big meetings the next
day, with Manmohan Singh in the morning and Sonia Gandhi in the
evening.
The first meeting was a courtesy visit, intended for the consumption of
voters back home, to take up the issue of Tamil fisherman killed by the
Sri Lankan Navy. For the critical meeting, with Gandhi, Karunanidhi had
two items on his agenda, according to DMK sources. First, he needed to
convince the Congress chief that sufficient action had already been taken
against Raja, and that his forced resignation had settled the issue, which
could now be quietly buried. It meant, in other words, that he wanted her
to rein in the investigative agencies, in order to ensure that his own family
remained untoucheda delicate matter he hoped to raise with great
subtlety, preserving the formal and dignified relationship with Gandhi that
he had spent years cultivating.
The second order of business concerned the Congress-DMK alliance in the
looming state elections. Karunanidhi wished to convey to Gandhi, gently
yet firmly, that the DMK would not buckle under any pressure to allot the
Congress more seats in the assembly elections.
The night was busy with thinking and planning. Nobody emerged from
Karunanidhis suite until after midnight, when Kanimozhi came out,
wearing a bright orange sari and carrying a copy of the Pakistan issue of
Granta. It was an unusually literary choice of reading material for an
Indian politician, but Kanimozhi, the author of five collections of Tamil
poetry and the founder of the states annual Tamil cultural festival, is
regarded as her fathers literary heir. This common cultural interest is one
of several reasons why Kanimozhi remains among the very few members
of the party or the family who still have Karunanidhis absolute trust.
After the Marans were cut to size in 2007, one party insider told me,
Karunanidhi began to see two distinct factions taking shape: the first
comprised those, like Kanimozhi and Raja, who he regarded as sincere in
their commitment to the Dravidian ideology, and therefore trustworthy;
the second group centred around the Marans and their associates, who
Karunanidhi saw as Anglicised businessmen whose political commitments
extended only to expanding their own wealth and power. Azhagiri
sympathised with the first group and Stalin with the second, but their
primary concern was with building their own political bases, and,
secondarily, with establishing their sons as successful businessmen.

Karunanidhis trusted aides, like Murugan and Baaluboth of whom joined

the chief minister during his first night at TN Housebelonged solidly to
the first camp. These groups still exist, the party insider told me. And
Karunanidhi sends strong messages about who his favourites are.
Look at the way Kalaignar behaved when he departed for Sonia Gandhis
house, the insider continued. He stopped the car just outside TN House
and asked for Baalu to join him and Kanimozhi so they could quickly have
a last-minute conversation in the car. He didnt call for Daya [Dayanidhi
Maran], who is a Cabinet minister, and, in terms of the protocol, occupies
a much senior role for the party right now.
In the end, nothing significant came of Karunanidhis meeting with Sonia
Gandhi; the two leaders agreed to face the elections together and
designated a committee to allocate seats. That night, however, TN House
was again buzzing with activity as all the Tamil ministers in the
government came to visit Karunanidhi, one by one. Union Home Minister P
Chidambaram arrived just after 9 pm in his private car, without an escort
vehicle or a security detail. He walked into Karunanidhis suite and, after
about 30 minutes, walked out even faster.
The next day, Karunanidhi returned to Chennai, satisfied that his visit
would convince Sonia Gandhi to put the brakes on further investigations in
the 2G scam. He would soon be proved wrong: two days later, the CBI
arrested Raja, and within a few weeks, investigators issued summonses to
both Kanimozhi and Karunanidhis wife Dayalu Ammal. And, at the
beginning of March, the DMK was forced to concede to the Congress
demand for 63 seats, 15 more than it had contested in the previous
elections in 2006. The Congress had refused to blink when Karunanidhi
threatened to withdraw his ministers from the Centre. The crucial trip to
Delhi had been a complete flop.
KARUNANIDHIS DAILY LIFE IN CHENNAI for the last several decades
has followed a rigid and unswerving routine. The trick of Karunanidhis
success is his time management, a former associate of the chief minister
told me. The meticulous division of Karunanidhis time nicely illustrates
the complex intermingling of family and party that has defined his long
tenure as DMK chieftain.
The distance between Gopalapuram and CIT Colony, two neighbourhoods
in central Chennai, is just 2 km. Karunanidhi makes this commute twice a
day, dividing his food and rest between his two wives, Dayalu Ammal and
Rajathiamma. All his meetings with visitors take place at Dayalus
Gopalapuram residence, where he also has his breakfast and evening tea.
He sleeps each night at Rajathiammas house in CIT Colony, where he has
his lunch and dinner.
Karunanidhi wakes up early every morning in CIT Colony at 4:30 am and
departs for Gopalapuram. He writes for an hour or two in his office there,
finishes his breakfast, meets his visitors and leaves for the secretariat. At
lunchtime, he returns to CIT Colony, eats and then rests for an hour,

before departing again for Gopalapuram for tea and more meetings with
visitors. Then he goes back to the secretariat before proceeding to the
DMK headquarters, Anna Arivalayam, to watch the news on television at
7:30 pm with party leaders.
This routine, I was told, rarely deviates and has hardly changed in the
decades since 1969, when Karunanidhi, then chief minister, famously
confirmed the existence of his second wife to a Congress MLA who boldly
asked him, in the state assembly, about his relationship with the
smalltime theatre actress, Rajathiamma.
The point-blank inquiry silenced the house, and Karunanidhi gave a
typically blunt response, revealing a secret known only to his closest
advisors: En magal Kanimozhyin thaayaar (my daughter Kanimozhis
mother).
Karunanidhi first met Rajathiamma when she played the heroine in a
propaganda play, Kakithappoo (Paper Flower), which he had written for
the 1967 election. Karunanidhis script portrayed the socialist promises of
the Congress as no better than the titular paper flower, and he acted the
part of the hero as well. As the play toured throughout the state, his
relationship with Rajathi blossomed, and a year later Kanimozhi was born.
The two wives do not talk to each other even now, the former associate
of Karunanidhi told me. I noticed during my visit to his birthplace,
Thirukkuvalai, that there were no pictures of Rajathiamma in the museum
dedicated to his life, though there are several old photos of a very happy
Dayalu, whom he married in 1949 after the death of his first wife,
Padmavathi, and a few black-and-white pictures of Kanimozhi as a child.
Nothing flows more freely in the drawing rooms of Chennai than stories
about the misdeeds of Tamil Nadus most powerful family, but a veil of
silence is rapidly drawn when the time comes to speak on the record.
After 10 days of interviews in Chennai, I could compile a list of at least 35
people, a veritable whos who of the local eliteincluding senior
politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, film directors, academics and
businessmenwho had regaled me with detailed information and
anecdotes but blanched at the prospect of displeasing Karunanidhi and his
clan with their words in print.
Criminal defamationsthats how they silence people, a prominent
businessman told me. Ill talk to you, but I dont want to be quoted.
A former employee of the family pulled out a sheaf of documents and
said, See, this is how they intimidated me. And thats when I stopped
working for them. If you write the details, a bureaucrat pleaded, they
will know that its me, so dont use this incident or any hintsdont write.
The atmosphere of intimidation was palpable, and the control of the partyfamily over so many aspects of lifefrom politics to the media to
businessgave little incentive to would-be whistleblowers. I can tell you

about larger criticisms, the general academic kind, even against the party.
That is okay, the prominent businessman told me. But if I give you the
details of the incidents that I personally know and you attribute them to
my name, Ill be finished here.
Even as Karunanidhis power and authority have grownalong with the
ambitions of his relatives and his capacity to intimidate othershe does
not blindly trust the information passed to him by anyone but his personal
secretary of four decades, K Shanmuganathan. Whenever petty politics
rise up within the family and the party, a former associate of Karunanidhi
told me, Kalignar trusts only Shanmuganathan for information.
Karunanidhi first met Shanmuganathan in the early 1960s: the DMK,
because of its separatist rhetoric, was regarded as a threat to national
security, and the Congress government had assigned Shanmuganathan,
then a government stenographer, to follow Karunanidhi and transcribe
every word he uttered in public.
When Karunanidhi learnt that a stenographer was trailing him, he grabbed
Shanmuganathans notes, and was surprised to see his own powerful
orations transcribed with perfect precision. He didnt miss a single
comma or an exclamation, Karunanidhis former associate said. So, when
Karunanidhi became a minister in Annadurais government in 1967, he
asked Shanmuganathan to work for him, and the two have been together
since.
Shanmuganathans eyes and ears reach everywhere. A docile man in his
early 70s, wearing a white cotton shirt and trousers, he walks with a
pronounced limp. But when he carries an important document for
Karunanidhi or attends to urgent businesssuch as ensuring that
Chidambaram did not talk to the press after his late-night meeting with
Karunanidhi at TN HouseShanmuganathan runs down corridors and
jumps stairs. He is so shrewd, a senior journalist told me, that even if
you managed an exclusive interview with Karunanidhi, he would sit there,
transcribe you both, and will make sure that every journalist in town got
the transcripts before you reached your office.
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Karunanidhi is precisely what I had
been promised by Shanmuganathan. I had been told to arrive, on 2
February, at Karunanidhis Gopalapuram residence in time for the chief
ministers afternoon tea. As my taxi neared the house, I received an SMS
from a colleague in Delhi, which said simply: Raja arrested. When I told
my taxi driver the news, he responded, with evident satisfaction, Uppu
thinavan thanni kudipan, which, translated literally, means the one who
eats salt will drink water. Raja, in other words, had to pay the price for
his wrongdoing. One trillion rupees! the driver continued. Think of that
amount. If I had even a hundred thousand rupees, all my problems would
be solved.
Many of the DMK insiders I had interviewed told me confidently that the
spectrum scam wouldnt register with ordinary voters because most would

not understand what it was actually about. But for the taxi driverand,
presumably, many others as wellthe intricate details of Rajas alleged
crime were irrelevant: the massive sums involved and the image of a DMK
politician getting arrested sufficed to rouse his anti-incumbency sentiment
against Karunanidhi.
I could see TV screens in the window of an electronics showroom flashing
Rajas arrest on their news tickers, and I realised that my meeting with
Karunanidhi would now almost certainly be cancelled. When I called up
my off-the-record source in the chief ministers office, he said that
Karunanidhi was furious, barking at anyone on the staff who went near
him.
It wasnt hard to imagine Karunanidhis rage and grief at the unwelcome
news: Raja had long held a place very close to Karunanidhis heart. A
former DMK student leader with degrees in science and law, who wrote
essays about Ambedkar and Periyar and professed great interest in
poetry, Raja had tremendously impressed Karunanidhi as he rose through
the party ranks. During his stint in the Union Cabinet, Raja had also
served as a sort of informer for Karunanidhi, keeping him apprised of the
activities of the other DMK representatives in Delhi, particularly Dayanidhi
Maran.
For Karunanidhi, Rajas arrest meant more than the loss of a beloved ally.
He had come to see the 2G investigations as part of a more sinister plan
on the part of the Congressan attempt to dump and then bury the DMK.
This was the fear he confided to his innermost circle: that Sonia Gandhi
was preparing to betray the DMK, just as her mother-in-law had 40 years
ago. Between 1969 and 1971, when she needed the DMKs votes to stay
in power at the Centre, Indira Gandhi allied with Karunanidhi. But after
Gandhi won a landslide majority in 1971, Karunanidhi believed that she
jettisoned the DMK in an attempt to regain the Congress strength in
Tamil Nadu, and offered support to MGR when he left Karunanidhi in order
to split the DMK.
Only two days earlier, Karunanidhi had met Sonia Gandhi in Delhi to
suggest that Raja be spared further punishment; now his loyal ally was
under arrest. Soon Karunanidhis sources in the CBIs Chennai office
would tell him that investigators were planning to summon his wife and
daughter. Meanwhile, the Congress was escalating its demands for seats
in the upcoming election. Everything, Karunanidhi feared, was suddenly
slipping out his control.
Just before Karunanidhis 4 pm tea, I arrived at Gopalapuram, an upmarket residential colony of two and three-storey houses, where
Karunanidhis home is located opposite a small Sri Venugopalaswamy
temple. Shanmuganathan told me to wait at the gate. A grave silence
hung in the air, and there seemed to be almost no movement inside the
house. After an hour, Shanmuganathan delivered the obvious news:
Sorry, you dont need to wait. He will not talk to anyone. I thought I
could arrange the meeting. But these are bad days.

A few minutes later, Karunanidhi and Shanmuganathan left the house in

the Toyota Alphard, followed by 12 white Ambassadors and five Tata
Safaris, which emerged one after another from behind the building.
Karunanidhi and his men were on their way to hand out the contract for
the last phase of the DMKs latest and most successful handout
programmethe distribution of 17.2 million colour television sets that
Karunanidhi had promised the voters before the previous election.
THREE: THE SPOILS OF POWER
TWO STREETS LEAD to Karunanidhis house in Gopalapuram.
The walls along one first street are covered with posters of Selvi,
Karunanidhis first daughter, wearing a bright yellow sari and flashing a
big, toothy smile. She does not have the trained pose of a politician
before the camera, and the slightly unguarded photo looks as if its been
taken from a family album. The other street, by contrast, is lined with
posters of Kanimozhi, posed stylishly in a red sari, with her hair carefully
arranged and a sober, steady smile. Both sets of posters also include a
smaller inset photo of Karunanidhi, as if to remind everyone where the
two daughters came from.
Selvi is not in politics and lives in Bengaluru with her husband Murasoli
Selvam, a film producer. But she is regarded as the glue holding together
the familys money wing, which consists of Stalin as the political heir,
Kalanithi Maran as the moneybags, and Dayanidhi Maran as ambassador
to Delhi. The posters of Selvi must have been put up by Stalin supporters
to make an impression on Karunanidhi as he comes and goes every day,
the party insider told me.
Kanimozhi, who represents the familys other camp and enjoys an
enviably close relationship with her father, is not seen as a serious player
in any struggle for the partys future; she is considered too soft and shy to
contend with any moves by her half-brothers, Stalin and Azhagiri, to take
power.
Karunanidhis sons have carved up Tamil Nadu between themselves, and
their respective turfs can be easily identified by whose huge cutouts line
the roadside. In the nine southern districts, where Azhagiri is clearly
dominant, posters of Stalin are hardly to be found. But in most districts in
the north and west, as well as in Chennai, it is Stalins cutout that is
ubiquitous. (Some of the cutouts, perhaps unwittingly, seem to depict a
process of political evolution, with a miniature Periyar, slightly larger
Annadurai, big Karunanidhi, and an enormous Azhagiri or Stalin.)
Stalin, born five days after the death of his Russian namesake in March
1953, entered politics during the Emergency, earning his stripes at 23
after being sent to jail with other DMK activists. Currently the deputy chief
minister, Stalin is known as the progress man by his party colleagues.
He has cultivated an image as a competent administrator, and is always
quick to take credit for newly-constructed highways, foreign direct

investment and state welfare schemes.

Azhagiri, older by three years, is a failed businessman-turned-politician.
When the brothers clashed in the 1980s over who would control Chennai,
Karunanidhi dispatched Azhagiri to Madurai as publisher of the party
mouthpiece, Murasoli. Once there, Azhagiri appears to have made friends
with almost every bigtime gangster in the city. In Madurai, several people
whispered to me a list of Azhagiris buddies: Pottu Suresh, Attack Pandi,
Karate Pandian, SR Gopi, Mannar Mannanganglords with notorious
nicknames and criminal records, some of whom now occupy public office
in the city municipality or panchayats. Generally regarded as rough, brutal
and uncouth, Azhagiri was arrested and tried in 2003 for the murder of
Pasumpon T Kiruttinan, a former DMK minister close to Stalin; he was
acquitted five years later for lack of evidence.
More than a few people who know both brothers, however, insist that
Azhagiri is the prisoner of an image that others have created for him. His
English is poor, and he lacks the sophistication and polish necessary to
craft a favourable perception of himself among the educated middle class.
His natural disposition is a mix of big brother and feudal lordwho will do
anything to protect those loyal to him and punish anyone who poses a
threat.
If formative years on playgrounds are an indicator of character, a starkly
different picture of the two brothers emerges from some businessmen in
Chennai who played cricket with both Azhagiri and Stalin at the Central
Leather Research Institute ground. One described the strongman of
Madurai as Thankamana (golden) Azhagiri while few had positive
memories of Stalin. Evan perukki (hes a thug), one said. Stalin was
individualistic, calculating and selfish, another told me, while Azhagiri
was caring and highminded.
If the family does break into warring camps, the victor is likely to be the
one that has amassed the most power and influence prior to the split. The
strength of a political base or a vote bank, in such calculations, is only one
factor among many. One key area of conflict will be who controls the
Tamil film industry, known as Kollywood, which has an annual turnover of
`35 billion. The cinema business is a source of financial strength, but
more importantlyas all of the rivals are well awarewhoever controls
the Tamil film industry also controls Tamil politics.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the DMK and Karunanidhi dominated cinema
production, and cannily used the medium to help the party come to
power. When MGR ruled the industry in the 1970s and 1980s, Karunanidhi
couldnt unseat him. In the 1990s, the attention of powerbrokers and
audiences alike turned to television, and the ascendance of Sun TV helped
the DMK ensure that Jayalalithaas grip on the chief ministership was
shorter-lived than MGRs had been.
As the divisions within the family deepen, the battle for silver-screen
supremacy has been rejoined. The sons of both Azhagiri and Stalin have

their own film production companies, as does Kalanithi Maran, whose

empire includes a film subsidiary named Sun Pictures. All these outfits
were started in 2008, when the family conflict spun out of control.
Although the rival camps have nominally reached a truce, the three
production companies remain locked in competition to produce and
distribute films. For now, the edge might lie with Kalanithis Sun, which
produced the most expensive film ever made in Asia, the 2010
Rajnikanth-Aishwarya Rai blockbuster Endhiran, at a reported cost of
`1.75 billionand took in `3.5 billion at the box office.
Given that Tamil films have always played an outsized political role, it
might seem natural that the battle between Azhagiri, Stalin and the
Marans has been extended to the cinema screen, or that the three DMKconnected production houses utterly dominate the local market, freezing
out anyone who doesnt play by the party rules. For Karunanidhis
generation, cinema promised political power because it very effectively
promoted the ideology and ideals of men like Annadurai, MGR and the
younger Karunanidhi. Today, though, the familys film and television
ventures are first and foremost a means to making a fortune; the only
ideology they endorse is the interest and greed of a particular faction
inside the dynasty.
IT WAS IDEOLOGY, after allthe persuasive force of the Dravidian
awakening launched by Periyar and refined by Annaduraithat brought
the DMK to power. But the party learnt quickly that retaining power could
not be achieved by ideology aloneand decided, over time, that the spoils
of its power were too good to waste pursuing ideological ends. It was
under Karunanidhi that the DMK embraced power for its own sake, and
the younger members of his dynasty naturally came to regard power and
money as the only worthwhile pursuits.
In this lies the greatest irony of Karunanidhis long reign: that a man who
believedand continues to believewith all sincerity, in the ideology of
Periyar and Annadurai is the same man who willfully presided over its
debasement and decline. Karunanidhi still knows how to pay lip service to
Tamil nationalism, and does so with verve and gusto when the situation
demands it. But his political descendants, whose utter lack of ideology he
finds distasteful, learnt their ways under his tutelage.
Kalanithi and Dayanidhis father, Murasoli Maran, who served as the
DMKs face in Delhi as an MP for more than three decades, possessed a
blend of ideological zeal and cosmopolitian polish, with his graduate
degree and fluent English. Until his death from multiple-organ failure in
2003, Murasoli and his uncle Karunanidhi controlled the party together.
After Murasolis death, Karunanidhi passed the parliamentary seat on to
Dayanidhi and had him installed as Union communications minister,
expecting he would follow in his fathers footsteps. Kalanithi, the elder
son, stayed away from active politics and concentrated on building his
business. But Karunanidhi soon realised that he had badly misjudged both
the Maran brothers.

The Christian school-educated, English-speaking Marans had degrees from

business schools abroad and a natural knack for amassing wealth, but
they had little time and less regard for the party cadres and their
unsophisticated ways, or for impassioned recitations of Tamil poetry. If
Karunanidhi hadnt yet come to terms with the hollowing out of the DMKs
ideology that transpired under his watch, the rise of the Marans made it
impossible for him to ignore.
In the end, however, what pushed Karunanidhi to turn on the Marans had
nothing to do with ideology or politics: he thought they had cheated him
of his money.
When Kalanithi launched Sun TV in 1993, not long after returning from
the US with an MBA, he sought Karunanidhis help to get the fledgling
channel off the ground. Karunanidhi gave his grand-nephew cash and
office space in the DMK headquarters, Anna Arivalayam. He also lent him
use of his name to help Kalanithi secure mortgages, and the DMK cadres
in towns and villages, who saw Sun TV as the party channel, helped build
its vast cable infrastructure.
According to the party insider, Kalanithi told his father and grand-uncle,
Im not interested in politics. Ill give you 10 percent of the air time, and
you do whatever you want with it. But the remaining 90 percent is mine.
He assembled a package of soaps, serials and films that he ran round-theclock, and quickly won a commanding share of the market, paying little to
no attention to the news bulletins that Sun TV broadcast three times a
day.
But even that small fraction of news programming had a revolutionary
effect: the AIADMKs Jayalalithaa was then the chief minister, and Suns
news coverage pulled no punches to hammer home the DMK party line.
Videos of Jayalalithaas blindingly ostentatious display of wealth during
the wedding of her foster son were beamed insistently into Tamil homes,
while stringers allied to the DMK poured in reports and visuals with a proDMK slant from all over the state. Karunanidhi clobbered Jayalalithaa in
the 1996 election, and went on to complete a full five-year term for the
first time in 20 years.
Since then, Sun has grown by leaps and bounds: it is now Asias most
profitable broadcaster, consistently reporting profit margins in excess of
70 percenttwice the industry average. Today, the Sun empire includes
20 television channels, 45 FM stations, two daily newspapers, four weekly
magazines, one Direct to Home (DTH) service and an airline.
Kalanithi has undoubtedly reaped immeasurable benefit from his affiliation
with Karunanidhi and the DMK, but those who know him well insist that
his business acumen should not be underestimated. Kalanithi understood
the media business, the party insider told me. When every media
company in India was bidding for FM licenses 12 years ago, and everyone
was still clueless about the FM market, he predicted, Only Times will
succeed. And then Ill succeed. India Today will fail. StarTV will fail. All

other media groups will fail. Because only Times and I know the most
valuable lesson in media: not to bring your experience in one medium to
another.
In April 2006, three years after Murasoli Maran died, and two years into
Dayanidhis tenure as Union telecom minister, Kalanithi entered the
capital market to raise funds for the 41 FM radio licences he had bought
at auction. But before floating the public offering, he wanted to
consolidate his control of the company by buying back family-held shares.
In October 2005, in fact, he had approached Karunanidhi hoping to
repurchase the 20-percent stake the family held in the name of Dayalu
Ammal.
At that time, the company was not yet the behemoth it would soon
become. (This was before the 41 new FM radio licenses, before Sun won
the DTH license, and before Kalanithi acquired SpiceJet, then the most
profitable airline in India.) Azhagiri, two sources informed me, objected
strenuously to the buyback. But Kalaignar went ahead, and pacified both
Azhagiri and Dayalu, a prominent businessman said. He told them, If
they ask, we must sell.
Karunanidhi and his family took Kalanithi at his word regarding the value
of the shares. The price, Karunanidhi later admitted while delivering a
public admonishment to the Marans after their falling out, was `1 billion.
Strangely, in the Red Herring Prospectus that companies are required to
file with the Securities and Exchange Board of India when they go public,
Kalanithi stated that Dayalu held 115,0005.75 percentof Suns shares,
which he bought for `3,173.04 per share, for a total price of only `365
million. But if Karunanidhi received `1 billion from the Marans, why did
Kalanithi declare he had only paid `365 million? And why did Karunanidhi,
when he disclosed the sale to the press, claim a 20-percent stake when
Kalanithi listed it at 5.75 percent?
After issuing 10 percent of the Suns shares in the initial public offering,
Kalanithi Maran reportedly raised some 6 billion rupees. If Karunanidhis
stake had indeed been 20 percent, his investment was worth about `12
billion at the time of the sale, which preceded Suns subsequent meteoric
growth.
Azhagiri raised hell, said the party insider. He would go to Dayalu every
time Karunanidhi was not at home and fume over how they were
cheated. Around the same time, one of Kalanithis right-hand men, an
old school friend named Sharad Kumar, fell out with him. Sharad was
brought before Karunanidhi, the party insider explained, and exposed
the truthwhich was that Kalanithi had deliberately undervalued the
shares. That convinced Karunanidhi of the Maran treachery.
When the party voted to remove Dayanidhi from the Union Cabinet a few
months later following the Dinakaran poll debacle, Karunanidhi aired his
hurt and anger in public, writing a sentimental poem for the front page of

the DMK paper, Murasoli. The poem was titled Ninaivugalin Popaatu (War
Song of Memories). One stanza read:

Throgathaal ennai thulaithu chendra thozhargal silarum

Thol meethu kai potu thunaikku vanthu vittom enbathum
kanavuthaney
Palikkaatha kanavugalaal manam valikkaathu
Jolikkaathu koozhangkarkal kuppaikkey pogum
Pattai theeti paarthalum payanillai

Some friends who pierced me through betrayal

Wasnt it a dream, people putting their hands on my shoulders to
support me
Unfulfilled dreams dont hurt the mind
Stones that dont shine are thrown away as worthless
It is useless even to polish it
WHEN KARUNANIDHI finally went to war with the Marans, he knew he
had to cripple their most powerful weapon, Sun TV. So, in October 2007,
he booted out Suns setup at the DMK party headquarters, where it had
been a fixture since 1992, and launched a new channel named Kalaignar
TV with Kalanithis estranged Sun colleague Sharad Kumar at the helm.
Karunanidhi didnt stop there. He soon set his sights on ending Sun TVs
monopoly of cable distribution in Tamil Nadu. To challenge Kalanithis
distribution arm, Sumangali Cable Vision (SCV), which had locked up 90
percent of the market, Karunanidhi took the unprecedented step of
establishing a public-sector company, Arasu Cable Corporation. If you
were to look for an illustration of the unusual nexus of politics, familial
rivalry and telecast power that characterises Karunanidhis DMK, youd be
hard-pressed to improve on the example of a sitting chief minister using
public funds to undermine his grand-nephews cable TV operation.
Cable distribution in India is a notoriously murky business; Tamil Nadu,
unsurprisingly, is worse than the national norm. As the head of a national
television network told me, Its the only state in the country where one
distributor has an absolute monopoly. All of us will have to pay any price
they demand. If they charge `20 million this year to carry our signal in
Chennai, next year it will be arbitrarily raised to `40 million. No questions

asked, no answers given. It is Sun country.

The dirty tricks of the trade include underreporting the subscriber base to
minimise payment to broadcasters, manipulating viewership surveys to
skew advertising tariffs and fudge revenue figures, and attempting to
eliminate rival distributors by all means necessary.
Cable is a business built from the street, said Sashi Kumar, chairman of
the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai and founder of Asianet TV.
You have to erect posts, tie the cables on the trees, and protect them
from destruction. So there is always a street character to the cable
distribution business.
To fightand winhis street war with the Marans, in November 2008,
Karunanidhi brought in C Umashankar, a bright, superefficient IAS officer
and no-nonsense administrator who had gained repute in Tamil Nadu for
his strong stand against corruption and meticulous implementation of
government projects.
The Arasu Cable Corporation laid down optical fibre cable at blistering
speed and offered subscribers a package with more channels and lower
rates than SCV. According to documents that I obtained from a
government records office, Arasu Cable proceeded to put a serious dent in
SCVs market share: in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadus third largest city, with a
subscriber base of 800,000 homes, 90 percent of the operators migrated
to Arasu Cable.
But when the divided family eventually decided to establish peace among
its combatants, Umashankar worried that Arasu Cable would be unlikely
to survive, and he went to Karunanidhi to tell him as much.
I told him, he said, now that youve both come together, what is the
necessity of keeping me? Transfer me out, sir.
No, no, Karunanidhi said. Arasu Cable is different. Sun TV is different.
You continue. You know Im a socialist and I like public sector. Arasu
Cable is a public entity. So you go and work double the speed.
Umashankar was elated. The CM has asked me to continue double the
speed, he told local reporters. Arasu is a business entity floated with
taxpayers money, and it means business.
At about the same time, however, 500 km away in Coimbatore, SCV
employees began to destroy Arasus cables.
Dozens of SCV goons would come in the night, methodically destroying
the Arasu cable infrastructure in different parts of the city, Umashankar
told me. In fact, they would leave holes in the cable with iron punchers,
cutting the optical fibre inside. From outside, the cable would still be
looking alright, but the signals would be gone.

In early December 2008, Arasus optical fibre cables were slashed at more
than 60 locations. One area after another dropped out of Arasu Cables
footprint. Umashankar wrote letters asking for police protection, but none
came. He went on night patrols with his officers and even caught a few
SCV workers in the act. But the police wouldnt handle the case, he said.
They were under political pressure.
Umashankar wrote several letters to Karunanidhi, the chief secretary and
the police chief asking that the offenders be immediately prosecuted. But
he received no response. In Coimbatore alone, Arasu Cables market
share dwindled to 10 percent in days.
Finally, Umashankar wrote a proposal for the nationalisation of SCVa
nightmarish proposition for any private companyand sent it to
Karunanidhi and the chief secretary. It said:
The rationale behind this proposal to nationalise SCV is based on the
premise that this Company has become a (jungle) law unto itself. In
other words, this Company has achieved a notorious distinction of
being a rogue entity by illegally cutting cables of a Government owned
Company. The logic is, if SCV could successfully terrorise a
Government owned company, one can imagine the plight of the other
competing MSOs [multiple service operators] in Tamil Nadu. One can
reasonably infer that SCV has been successfully doing this illegal and
rogue practice for years together and this had probably not come to
light in view of the private sector vs. private sector conflict so far.

The next thing he knew, Umashankar had received a transfer order

relieving him of his duties as the managing director of Arasu Cable and
making him the commissioner of Small Savings, an ex cadre post. Today,
Arasu Cable exists only on paper. And last year, unable to stand up to
SCVs muscle, Hathaway, a national cable operator, shut down its
operations in Tamil Nadu.
When I asked Umashankar for his impressions of Karunanidhi, he made
no attempt to conceal his frustration. You cant expect a rational reaction
from him, Umashankar said. If money is involved, his family interest is
involved, he will take only wrong decisions, decisions favouring only his
family. No public interest, nothing.
FOUR: MAVELI AND ETTAPPAN
ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON in early February, I set out from Madurai to
the village of Uthapuram, about an hours drive away. As the car
approached our destination, the green serenity of the landscape gave way
to an ambient tension; on the roadside, armed policemen in groups of 10
or 15 stood sentry every few hundred meters. They wore the badges of
the specialised riot personnel of the Armed Reserve Police, and Tamil
Nadus Swift Action Force. A week before my visit, hundreds of Dalits had

been arrested while attempting to enter Uthapurams Muthalamman

templewhere they have been banned for more than 150 yearsand the
local authorities had imposed a curfew.
The issue of temple entry is of particular significance in the history of the
DMK. One of the first major milestones in the genesis of Periyars SelfRespect Movement came in 1924, when he travelled to Vaikom, in what is
now Kerala, to join an agitation by low-caste Hindus who had been
banned from a Shiva temple. Periyar was jailed thrice for his prominent
role in the historic Vaikom Satyagraha, and the Congress party hailed
him as Vaikom Veerar (Vaikom Hero). He retold the story of Vaikom
again and again in the decades that followed.
Eighty years ago, temple entry was a rallying point among low-caste
Hindus protesting their treatment by Brahmins, and anti-caste sentiment
became one of the tenets of the Dravidian awakening movement that in
time gave birth to the DMK. Uthaparam is now the Vaikom of the Dalits in
Tamil Nadu, a state governed by Dravidian parties for the past 44 years.
Today the low-caste Hindus of Uthaparam, whose local leaders are DMK
followers, are ranged against Dalits: the oppressed of a century ago have
become the oppressors.
I was pulled into a police barracks across the temple as soon as I stepped
out of the car, and made to wait for more than an hour while the officer in
charge phoned his superiors to determine if I should be allowed into the
square. For the past few years, the police have imposed frequent curfews
aimed at blocking attempts to enter the temple. The village shops along
the narrow roads leading into Uthaparam are shuttered for days at a time,
and the upper-caste Pillaimar have assembled a group of 30 young men
to keep a round-the-clock watch on the temple. If they see any sign of
movement in the village, they storm out in full force, ready to fight, as
they did when I first arrived.
There is no need for journalists to come here, one of them said. We will
bury you here if you hang around. The police, who are blamed by the
Dalits for enforcing the writ of the upper castes, signalled their agreement
with the temple guards, and told me to leave immediately.
The Pillaimar comprise only about 20 percent of the approximately 1,000
familes in Uthapuram. The Pallar, Parayar and Arunthathiyarall Dalit
groupscomprise the majority, roughly 75 percent, and mostly work as
agricultural labourers on Pillaimar-owned land. The village has a long
history of intercaste clashes, the most recent being in 1989 and 2008; in
both instances, the casualties were Dalits.
The temple ban is only a part of the issue, said M Thangaraj, a villager
involved in the recently formed Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication
Front. We face untouchability on a daily basis. We are not allowed to
wear slippers, we are not allowed to buy a motorcycle or a three wheeler,
we are not allowed to wait next to the Pillaimar for a bus.

Last year, TK Rangarajan, a CPI (M) Rajya Sabya MP, offered `350,000
from the Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme funds for
the construction of a bus shelter in Uthaparam, but the Pillaimar wrote to
him declining his offer. We do not want to stand in the same bus stand
with these scheduled caste men, I was told by the local Pillaimar leader
SP Murugesan.
The DMK has never been a pro-Dalit party, the editor-in-chief of The
Hindu, N Ram, told me. When caste clashes take place, they either stay
neutral, or align with the caste Hindus.
There was certainly a time when Karunanidhi and the DMK took
affirmative action seriously, as can be seen from the fact that Tamil Nadu
has 69 percent reservation for the Backward Castes (BCs), Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes in education and government jobs, the
highest among any Indian state. But the DMK, which draws its votes
largely from the educated middle class of the BCs, quickly lost interest in
caste agitations once the BCs had attained a measure of upward mobility.
ON 3 FEBRUARY, a day after Rajas arrest, the DMK organised an
evening rally at a ground in Saidapet. It was timed for after a crucial
election-strategy meeting of the partys general council that started that
morning. For months, people had been asking whether Karunanidhi would
speak out against Raja and at least try to cleanse the party of the
inescapable taint of the 2G scam. But as Karunanidhi addressed the
evening throng of the party faithful, it became clear that even Rajas
arrest had not convinced him to heed advice from Stalin, Azhagiri and the
Marans to distance himself from the corrupt minister.
Its quite remarkable for an important politician to go and defend a
follower whos completely indefensible, N Ram said. And Karunanidhi did
that.
I stood in the front row of the Saidapet ground, which was filled with more
than 10,000 party workers. After Stalin gave his own speechlisting
government schemes that he had successfully implementedthe
microphone was repositioned in front of Karunanidhis wheelchair. The
massed workers fell silent.
Karunanidhi spoke, slowly and carefully, in his trademark gravelly
baritone. His speech lasted 45 minutes, 30 of which were devoted to
retelling a mythological tale intended to rally his audience in Rajas
defence.
Today, Im going to tell you the story of an old Dravida king, Maveli,
Karunanidhi began. He was the nicest king on earth, and there was no
cheating, poverty and deceit in his kingdom.
The storyteller in Karunanidhi narrated the myth in great detail. Over the
years, he told the assembled crowd, the king Maveli became so famous
for his goodness that even the gods and goddesses in the celestial world

became jealous. Conspiring to eliminate Maveli, they sent Vishnu,

disguised as a poor Brahmin boy, to deceive the king and banish him to
the nether.
Our Raja, Karunanidhi concluded, is like Maveli. Because of his Dravida
origins, he has been victimised in -Delhi.
It was a vintage Karunanidhi performance, sincere and disingenuous at
the same timestubbornly refusing to abandon a loyal if questionable
comrade, summoning his skills as a storyteller, employing the narrative of
Tamil-Dravida victimhood central to the ideology of a movement whose
ethical tenets he long since set aside. But would Dravidian myths and
denunciations of northern aggression be enough to save the DMK from
defeat?
I asked Thamizharuvi Maniyan, a Gandhian who was appointed to a
position on the State Planning Commission by Karunanidhi but resigned in
frustration before the end of his term, if Karunanidhi could mount an
electoral defence by borrowing from mythology. Maniyan paused before
giving a scathing reply. Karunanidhi had chosen the wrong myth, he said:
I would call him Ettappan! A landlord in the 18th century who eliminated
the Madurai chieftain and folk hero Veerapandiya Kattabomman on behalf
of the British, Ettappans name has become synonymous with treason.
That is how he will be remembered by history, Maniyan continued. He
cheated the people with grand ideological promises, and he still thinks he
is very clever.
When I asked Cho Ramaswamy, a veteran Tamil comic actor and an
editor of the political magazine Thuglak how Karunanidhi would be
remembered in Tamil Nadu, his response was equally blunt: As someone
who looked after his family very well!
Karunanidhi will be remembered for the three to four institutions that are
working decently in Tamil Nadu the public distribution system,
healthcare and a few social welfare programmes, N Ram concluded. But
he will be mostly remembered for institutionalising corruption in all
spheres of the state.