Tamil Nadu: Coalition blues and Congress' options

With Congress president Sonia Gandhi addressing a massive rally in Tiruchi city only weeks back, and rival AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa going to the cadres and the masses for the third time in as many months, this time in the southern temple-city of Madurai, speculation is rife as to the future of the ruling coalition in Tamil Nadu, ahead of the Assembly polls that are due in May next. In between, the ruling DMK, as if to counter the propaganda value of Jayalalithaa’s successful rallies in Coimbatore and Tiruchi, did hold an equally impressive one, again in Tiruchi, setting the mood for the elections, both among cadres of various political parties and also the voter at large.

Independent of her declared position that she would give her demoralised cadres the ‘coalition that you desire’, the chances of the Congress making the grade in terms of a share in power, particularly the ambitious post of deputy chief minister or first-innings chief minister in a combine with the AIADMK, are speculative at best and remote, otherwise. . Pre-poll calculations of the kind would hence entail the AIADMK and/or Congress to think in terms of roping in the DMDK.For now, any further Congress-led speculation on the future of the electoral alliance may prove to be counter-productive, instead, unless the party is talking in terms of a ‘third front’, where too it would have to accept the leadership of the DMDK. The latter would argue the case of proven vote-share and also the ‘Vijaykanth image’ for leading an alliance, but that in turn could put off prospective allies, despite the intervening commitment to the contrary from the likes of the PMK, for instance. Such a course, once again, could limit the Congress’ ambitions of returning to the centre-stage of State politics for a much longer time to come than under the eroding vote-base of the existing ‘Dravidian majors’. Yet, current talks about the Congress likely to ditch the DMK may have the potential for both to lose on the ‘transferable vote-share’ in their kitty for an electoral ally. It was the inability of the BJP ally from the 1999 parliamentary polls to transfer its new-found vote-share that forced the DMK, PMK and MDMK allies to part company ahead of Elections-2004, as they found out in the Assembly polls of 2001. For now however, Jayalalithaa seems to have let the cat among the pigeons in the rival DMK alliance. True to precedent, the State Congress has been talking divergently and the DMK, nervously. In true form, Karunanidhi has since revived the ‘Sri Lankan issue’, something that did not click with the State’s voter even at the height of Elections-09, which alone helped the DMK-led alliance with Congress as an ally to bag 28 of 40 seats from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, which will also be having near-simultaneous Assembly polls in 2011. When Congress president Sonia Gandhi touched down at the Chennai Airport in the first half of October, en route to the Tiruchi rally, Karunanidhi handed over to her a letter seeking Central intervention in meeting the needs and aspirations of the Sri Lankan Tamils.

More recently after Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s New Delhi visit for the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, he has issued a statement of the kind, in which he has also tried the balancing game, by referring to the ‘fratricidal war’ among the Tamil militant groups, in which the LTTE killed a host of local Tamil leaders in that country. The statement was conspicuous by its absence about any reference to the ‘Rajiv Gandhi killing’. In turn, Jayalalithaa, at her Madurai speech, did not touch upon either the ‘Kachchativu issue’ or the ‘fishermen’s problem’, or even the larger ‘Sri Lankan issue’, which surprisingly topped her campaign agenda in 2009 elections.

Courtesy Orfonline