Karunanidhi, the Kalaignar: His politics, his persona, his personal life
DMK supremo M Karunanidhi passed away on 7 August. He was 94 years old. He had been a pillar of Tamil Nadu's politics, a crucial part of the Dravidian movement, at the forefront of championing Tamil identity on the national stage, often caught in controversies, adored by his party cadres. Journalist Sandhya Ravishankar's book Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics is an intricately researched study of the ideology and times that made Karunanidhi the 'Kalaignar' of Tamil Nadu. It is also a deeply personal account, from his family and numerous acquaintances, of the man behind India's most famous dark glasses, a patriarch, a person of letters and creative art, a thinker, a man of vision and tenderness, a politician who survived times that would have crushed others.
Edited excerpt from the chapter 'The Family Man'
It was 1968 and Transport Minister Karunanidhi had set all tongues wagging. The DMK had romped home to power under its leader CN Annadurai and a wounded Congress party had to have its revenge. Meanwhile, a scandal awaited and it arrived in the form of Rajathi Ammal, who had given birth to a baby girl.
When asked for the name of the father by the hospital, she told the truth – M Karunanidhi.
Congressmen found out and pounced on this information with glee. Karunanidhi was already married to Dayalu Ammal.
The state Assembly was the stage on which the attack took place. ‘Who is Rajathi?’ asked a Congress MLA dramatically at the session. A chorus began. Karunanidhi, in a quandary, was taken aside by Anna, who advised him to spill the beans. ‘En magal Kanimozhiyin thaayaar,’ he said upon his return, according to the state assembly records. She is the mother of my daughter Kanimozhi.
There was no further scandal or shaming left to be done after his utterance.
At least not in public. But Kanimozhi – meaning honeyed language in Tamil – bore the brunt of her father’s secret marriage to Rajathi Ammal.
Today, Kanimozhi, a Rajya Sabha MP of the DMK, has managed to rise out of a situation of stigma and pain to become the Delhi face of the party. ‘Yes, it was not easy. A lot of people use it to hurt you. It is used as a weapon also often. But one thing it has taught me is to never stand in judgement of anybody. And I am very grateful to both my parents for that,’ says Kanimozhi.
Kanimozhi was always the awkward child in the Karunanidhi family. Although close to her step-brother Alagiri, there was never any love lost between her and MK Stalin. As for the non-political heirs of Karunanidhi – daughter Selvi and son Tamilarasu – their relationship is, at best, an uneasy one. Karunanidhi, even as chief minister, would spend his evenings at CIT Colony, Rajathi Ammal’s and Kanimozhi’s home, and his mornings at Gopalapuram, where his wife Dayalu Ammal lives. While the Gopalapuram home is an old-world-style house with open gates and doors, the CIT Colony mansion was a fortress. The father went out of his way to ensure that his daughter was protected to the best of his ability.
‘He has never made me feel alienated,’ says Kanimozhi. ‘He has never made me feel anything that way. He has never given me any reason for him to explain anything. He has never let my mother down either. There are many politicians who make mistakes or do things. And they try to hide it under the carpet or they even hurt the person. Their children are neglected. I know children who do not have the courage to say who the father is because they may not live for another day if they did. So, if you look at all of that, my father was a very, very good man that way. I am not justifying it or saying that what he did was right or wrong. But I am grateful for what I learnt from it – never to judge. What he went through is what I am today. And I am perfectly all right with it.’
Being a politician’s daughter is difficult enough. But being the daughter of M Karunanidhi meant not having a traditional father. ‘He has been a very, very busy father. It took me some time to accept that he would not come to school for a Sports Day or things like that. But then after that, we found a lot in common, in books and reading and things. Maybe after my eighth or ninth standard,’ she says. It was Karunanidhi who introduced her to Periyar’s writings.
And his love for the written word was passed on to his daughter, a poet herself who is equally fluent in Tamil and English.
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In 2007, Kanimozhi took a reluctant step into politics. ‘I never wanted to be a politician because I always thought that I did not want to become part of an organisation. Then, at one particular point, my father wanted me to. He did not do much explaining. He said – Now we want you to come. Of course, there are some people he knew I couldn’t say no to and he sent them to convince me. So, I said yes,’ she says. The family was at loggerheads and Karunanidhi perhaps did not want his favourite daughter out in the cold. ‘Maybe I was one person who told him what I felt,’ says Kanimozhi when asked whether her father had a soft corner for her, as the talk went. ‘Of course, I respected him. That is it. I don’t think he had a soft corner for me. Maybe I talk a lot to him and say things which others wouldn’t because it would be disrespectful. I got away with saying a few things. It’s not that you get away completely. Of course, he will give you a dressing-down and tell you exactly what he thinks.’
Kanimozhi remembers instances when she refused to toe her father’s political line and spoke out instead on specific issues. ‘I had written a piece on Kannagi [a woman who burnt down Madurai, according to Tamil history] – it was completely against what the Dravidian movement portrays. I respect her for the courage she had to question the king. But people like to see her as a chaste woman and I don’t think we should celebrate things like that. It did create some embarrassment for him. I think when the Khushboo issue came, I spoke out against the PMK. But he did not give me a dressing-down at that time.’ Actor Khushboo found herself in the midst of a violent controversy in 2005 after she gave an interview to a publication advocating safe premarital sex and was attacked by the cadre of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK).
When the 2G scandal hit the DMK and its first family hard, Karunanidhi had tears for his daughter who was jailed. ‘I felt very bad for him because I did not want to become part of Kalaignar TV and he even spoke about it in public. He convinced me that he wanted me to be there, so he felt really guilty and he kept saying – I forced you into this and finally, this has happened. I said I am not interested, I don’t believe in that whole television thing and it will be very difficult for me to digest a lot of things there. But finally, he convinced me because he wanted it to be a family-run thing. But he felt very, very, very bad. And he knew actually what happened and how I would never be bothered about what happened at Kalaignar TV and I was completely clueless as to what was going on. And I think that made him feel really bad. He came regularly to jail, and every time he used to feel bad. I told him it’s an experience and that I was learning a lot and I was reading a lot. I used to tell him that. He knew that I wasn’t making any decisions at Kalaignar TV.’
Not many within the DMK will speak openly of the feuds within the first family of Tamil Nadu. Blood brothers at war, uncles and nephews at each other’s throats and those who married into the family taking sides and egging factions on – this was the Karunanidhi family by the 2000s, when the party came back to power, albeit with a slim margin.
In the 1980s, an exasperated father packed his elder son off to Madurai to oversee party affairs there. Bickering and jostling for power had begun between MK Alagiri and younger brother MK Stalin, both born to Dayalu Ammal and Karunanidhi. Karunanidhi’s eldest son, MK Muthu, born to his first wife Padmavathi, had long since bitten the political dust.
He had been propped up as an MGR lookalike when the party splintered in the 1970s. Muthu could not live up to the expectations of him in the cine field and subsequently disappeared from Kollywood after a few films. There were reports of his joining the AIADMK subsequently but he slowly faded away into oblivion. Today, Muthu is an ailing man who lives in Chennai’s suburbs in relative penury.
But Karunanidhi’s second wife Dayalu Ammal’s progeny did much better. Stalin’s steady rise in the party since the Emergency days and Karunanidhi’s indulgence had angered the elder sibling. The state, in a sense, was carved up between the brothers. Alagiri went on to build a fiefdom of his own in Madurai and southern Tamil Nadu. He rose to notoriety with the Thirumangalam Formula – the beginning of large-scale money distribution to voters during the by-polls in Thirumangalam, near Madurai, in 2009. He was seen as favouring gangs, violence, goondaism and crime. By 2014, he was at the peak of his powers, with the reputation of a feared don in southern Tamil Nadu who would let nothing and no one stand in his way.
Stalin, on the other hand – despite the allegations, in his younger days, of womanizing, harassment of women, even abduction – cleaned up his act and his image after the Emergency jail term. Karunanidhi trained him to work and rise through the ranks. He was, by all indications, the chosen son, the one who would be his political heir. Stalin, though, would never be anointed as such by his father. It was only after the ailing old man could not speak any longer that the party leadership appointed Stalin as the working president. Karunanidhi, though ailing, remains the president of the DMK. As Alagiri was strengthening his hold over Madurai and surrounds, Stalin was doing the same in northern Tamil Nadu. Alagiri used every opportunity to criticize and humiliate Stalin while speaking to the media.
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Stalin, for his part, remained largely silent – not taking the bait and refusing comment on Alagiri at media interactions. The crisis hit a crescendo in an unexpected manner. In May 2007, the Tamil newspaper Dinakaran, owned by the Maran brothers – Kalanidhi and Dayanidhi – published an opinion poll on who would be the next-rung choice of leader for the DMK after Karunanidhi. The survey results showed Stalin as the clear leader, with 70 per cent of votes polled. Alagiri and Kanimozhi polled 2 per cent each. The poll created ripples within the DMK family. Alagiri was furious. Stalin maintained a stoic silence.
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Today an uneasy peace has been brokered. Alagiri, who went silent for a couple of years after his expulsion from the party, has once again begun criticizing his younger brother for three successive election losses – in the 2014 general elections and in the 2011 and 2016 assembly polls. But his organisational back has been broken and he has been rendered irrelevant. Kanimozhi, who was closer to the elder sibling, has made her peace with Stalin, ensuring that her space within the DMK is protected. While not much love is lost between the two, they are civil in public appearances and refrain from offering negative comments about the other. The party now belongs to Stalin and his loyalists. Dissenters have either left or fallen in line, forced to complain about Stalin and his ways in secrecy.
Also read: What DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi means for Tamil Nadu's politics