Barely six days after the death of M Karunanidhi, his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party seems headed for a split, sources said yesterday.
Karunanidhi’s elder son and former federal minister M K Alagiri asserted that “true loyalists” of his late father were with him and that his brother M K Stalin was a poor leader.
Paying homage to Karunanidhi at his memorial at the Marina Beach in Chennai, Alagiri, who was expelled from the DMK in 2014 for criticising party leaders, told reporters that he had poured his anguish about the party to his father.
He said his anguish was about the party and not about the family and the public would come to know the whole story at the appropriate time.
Alagiri declined to comment about the DMK’s Executive Committee meeting to be held in Chennai today, saying he was no more in the party.
Alagiri aspired to succeed to the DMK’s top post but Karunanidhi, the party president until his death, picked his other son Stalin and designated him the working president.
But Alagiri said “Stalin may be the working president, but he is not working.” 
Alagiri told CNN News18 network he was the “correct person” to lead the party.
Asked if his rebellion will cause a split in the DMK, Alagiri said: “How can I split DMK when I am not part of the party?”
He said he would do better than Stalin if given an opportunity.
“That is what the cadres also want.” DMK sources said Alagiri was “acting out of frustration” and that he was desperately trying to get back into the party.
The sources said Alagiri was not a threat to the party and that the open revolt will not have any effect on today’s meeting. They claimed that he tried contacting Stalin through some family members.
Stalin has reportedly ruled out readmitting Alagiri into the party.
Alagiri and Stalin have been at loggerheads for years over who will inherit Karunanidhi’s legacy.
The family had presented a united face when the DMK stalwart was fighting for life. Alagiri was present at the hospital and was seen at his father’s funeral.
However, close watchers of Tamil Nadu politics expected him to flex his political muscle once Karunanidhi was gone.
The former minister wields considerable influence in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu. He was the party’s secretary for these districts before his expulsion.
Though the sibling rivalry for control of levers of power in the organisation was present for a long time, it came out in the open in January 2014 when Karunanidhi said Alagiri had talked about Stalin’s death in three months, a charge the Madurai strongman dismissed as baseless.
“He has some unknown hatred against Stalin. Alagiri even said Stalin would die in three months. No father can tolerate such words against a son. As the party chief, I had to tolerate them,” Karunanidhi had said and expelled Alagiri and his supporters from the party. 
Meanwhile, questions have cropped up whether the DMK and the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam should refashion their core strategy in the void left by the deaths of Karunanidhi and his arch rival J Jayalalithaa.
Ever since the AIADMK was floated by its founder and former chief minister M G Ramachandran (MGR), the one-point agenda for the party was to paint Karunanidhi as an ‘evil force’ and ‘corrupt’, which paid good dividends during the lifetime of MGR. Jayalalithaa stuck to the same line till her death in December 2016.
Now that both titans of Tamil Nadu politics are gone, should their successors adopt a different style of politics?
AIADMK spokesman and former finance minister C Ponnaiyan, former AIADMK MP K C Palanisamy and political analyst Raveendharan Dhuraiswamy feel there is no such need.
However, John Arokiasamy, a political strategist who had worked for the Pattali Makkal Katchi in Tamil Nadu during the last assembly elections and for the Congress in Karnataka in the recent polls, says both AIADMK and the DMK have to reorient their strategies.
“I see a need for both parties to reposition themselves and require ideology and leadership approach re-engineering,” says Arokiasamy.
Ponnaiyan said: “Our party founder MGR was against family control of DMK and corruption and floated the AIADMK. The condition in DMK has not changed now.”


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