M K Stalin
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Career
As in 2021 May
May 3, 2021: The Times of India
M K Stalin is an atypical dynast. He is where he is today, ready to take over as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, despite being his father’s son. Being the son of M Karunanidhi has been important to the extent that he, very early, got a place to stand in the wings of the grand theatre of the Dravida Munnetra Khazagam (DMK), without being asked to vacate his secure perch. No other advantages accrued to him readily for decades.
Stalin has stood at the spot in the wings for nearly half-century as a meek witness to everything that has happened inside the DMK and in Tamil Nadu. As a young man in the 1960s, he saw the anti-Hindi movement take shape and the rise of the DMK to power. In the 1970s, he was arrested during the Emergency and was beaten up in custody, which was a deeper initiation into agitational politics. He later saw the split of the DMK and the rise of the M G Ramachandran cult. Then he was witness to Tamil identity politics built around the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and then, he watched the rise of J Jayalalitha.
From 1996, his father played a continuous role in setting up various federal governments in Delhi, Stalin was witness to that too, without ever putting himself in the middle. Even as these things were unfolding in the public sphere, he also saw the branches of his father’s families expand and shrink. Stalin’s mother was Karunanidhi’s second wife. His father took a third one when he was in his teens.
Before, during, or in the aftermath of all these events that shaped DMK, Tamil Nadu and India, Stalin did not seem to have a decisive or defined role, he was a simple agitator like anybody else in the party. He surged with the DMK crowds, and when the agitation was over, he went back to his spot in the wings for the next event to participate. He was never into ideation, strategy or articulation, in all of which his father excelled. This was not some personal strategy of perseverance of a long-distance runner. This was neither calculated patience of one who bides his time. It was only about meek participation or rather non-participation bereft of direction or ambition. If one examines closely, this is what fills up most of Stalin’s political years – an uneventful haze. When people say that Stalin was not parachuted to his role by his father, and that he has been around for a very long time in the DMK, and that he has gone through the grind, this is what they perhaps mean – the fact that he has been a witness of an idle variety but never a catalyser. If he were to be a catalyser, if he were to be ambitious then he would have revolted to take his father’s chair like H D Kumaraswamy rebelled against his father, H D Deve Gowda, in 2006. Even earlier, Chandrababu Naidu rebelled against his father-in-law, N T Rama Rao, to usurp power. There are many such instances in contemporary politics. Stalin did none of this. He waited for his father’s ambition to die out, which somewhat happened in 2016 when DMK lost the assembly polls, and a wheelchair bound Karunanidhi, in his 90s, missed the chance of passing away while in office. There is no dynast in independent India who has waited as lengthy a time as Stalin to take the chair.
The perception that Karunanidhi groomed Stalin to take over the DMK and be his successor is a theory into which holes can be punched. It was clear that patriarch Karunanidhi did not want to retire and pass on the baton. Patriarchs do not retire.They do not make perfect plans but have ploys to survive and hold on till the end.Therefore, Stalin for the longest period was a ploy and a plan for his father to keep power to himself. There was an earlier template too. Karunanidhi had pushed M K Muthu, his first born, from his first wife, into acting in the early 1970s to contain and checkmate the popularity of M G Ramachandran. Perhaps, in the later years, Stalin was helpful to thwart the rise of people like Vaiko, who had ideological rigour and an oratory to match. Vaiko had everything in him to take over the DMK, but his ambition crossed paths with Karunanidhi, and he was finally cancelled out, and expelled. Had Stalin rebelled, would Karunanidhi have given up his lead position? That question itself was made irrelevant because Karunanidhi the script writer knew Stalin had surrendered to his whims and wisdom. That he was happy in the wings. The fact that Stalin’s older brother, M K Alagiri, had rebellious tendencies made Karunanidhi pack him off to a distance, and cut off supplies to a possible coup. Stalin, the dutiful son was a checkmate against Alagiri too, the possible renegade. Karunanidhi needed the chair warm for himself till he was around. What happened after he was gone was not the atheist’s problem.
The story of how Stalin was named ‘Stalin’ also reeks of a certain casualness. The lore goes that Karunanidhi was at condolence meeting for Joseph Stalin and when someone informed him of his son’ birth he instantly called him Stalin. He was not given a typical Dravidian name that reflected either nature, language or ideological pomposity. He was given his name even as Soviet Russia itself under Khrushchev was preparing to decry Joseph Stalin’s excesses. That was the irony of his birth and his father’s indifference to history.
The slow progress of Stalin from being a DMK youth wing leader, to Mayor of Chennai in 1996, to a minister for the first time in 2006 at the age of 53, and later deputy chief minister in 2009 when Karunanidhi was already 86 tells the story all by itself. His party role as treasurer also came very late. Some may point out that Stalin was named successor as early as 2013 by Karunanidhi but the patriarch wouldn’t hand over control. That was the reality. This is exactly what outgoing Chief Minister E Palaniswamy taunted Stalin and the DMK during the recent election campaign. He said: “Karunanidhi himself did not believe Stalin. During his last two years when he was ill, he did not hand over the party to him. He did not trust his son. In such a case how will people believe him?”
However, after the death of Karunanidhi in 2018, Stalin finally sat on the DMK saddle. There were doubts about how firmly he sat, but he sat. Amidst all the challenges in the larger playfield of Tamil Nadu politics at the time, Stalin’s personal challenge was to make the nucleus of his party, loosely constructed around his leadership, to hold, and to hold well. He started acting on his own, for the first time. He had seen everything from the wings, it was now time to walk into the middle. He transitioned well. He started to strategise and create a team of his own. His hardest task was to eliminate multiple power centres inside his large family and modernise the party organisation besides determining electoral goals. He did that successfully. The results of May 2 endorsed this. He is sure to be a chief minister very different from his father.
