Chief ministerial visits to the national capital are hardly headline material. Yet, last week as Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) President and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin was in Delhi on a three-day visit, the national media sat up and took notice.
The visit was to inaugurate the new office of the DMK on Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg in Delhi. But on the agenda for Stalin was much more than ribbon cutting.
Meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari, and Industries Minister Piyush Goyal were all packed into the schedule as Stalin went all out to project himself as a Chief Minister fighting for the rights of Tamil Nadu.
The meetings with the ministers can also be seen as Stalin softening his stand vis-a-vis the Centre. The DMK has constantly blamed the Modi government for almost all ills the state and the country faces. During his first visit to Delhi after becoming Chief Minister in June 2021, Stalin did not meet many of these ministers, and this did not miss the attention of the BJP leadership.
Stalin’s list of demands was long: from exempting Tamil Nadu students from NEET to finding a solution to the fishermen imbroglio with Sri Lanka, from stopping the proposed Mekedatu Dam project in Karnataka to release of pending GST arrears and asking for GST compensation to be extended beyond 2022, from speeding up of Tamil Nadu’s defence corridor project to support for more highway projects, etc.
Then were the visits to Delhi government schools and mohalla clinics along with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Invitations for the party office inauguration was extended to all leaders. Congress acting President Sonia Gandhi was the chief guest. The other leaders present at the inauguration were former Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, Left leaders Sitaram Yechuri and D Raja, and representatives from the Trinamool Congress and Telugu Desam Party.
Perhaps not as heavyweight an attendance list as Stalin may have hoped, but the presence of the Congress president served to further establish that the DMK chief enjoys closer relations with the Gandhi family than most in the Opposition.
Ideologically the DMK sees itself as the antidote to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Its opposition to the BJP is often more extreme than even the Congress or the communists on several issues. This, Stalin hopes would give him an edge in helping to put together an anti-BJP front at the national level.
Stalin appears to believe that his time has come to emerge as a unifier of the Opposition before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. His close rapport with the Gandhi family, perhaps much more than the equation that TMC’s Mamata Banerjee or Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) leader K Chandrasekhara Rao or even Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Sharad Pawar enjoy with Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, make him a possible choice to bring all the Opposition forces together in a rainbow alliance against the BJP. He also enjoys good ties with the Left parties who are the DMK’s allies in Tamil Nadu. Thus it is not unrealistic to see Stalin as a co-ordinator for this broad front.
Victory in the urban local body elections in Tamil Nadu, albeit against a divided Opposition, has given Stalin the breathing space to look towards building a larger role for himself in Delhi. There are no elections scheduled in the state till 2024, and the fact that the central agencies have as yet not turned the screws on the cases pending against DMK leaders may have emboldened him further.
However that may already be changing with one DMK minister being charge-sheeted this week, and at least another two rumoured to face the music soon. Also, the ghost of 2G remains hanging in appeal in the Delhi High Court. How aggressively Stalin attempts to play a role at the national level may also depend on what is the outcome of these developments in the courts.
Stalin, without doubt, will be aware of his limitations. Being a non-Hindi speaking leader, without any following outside Tamil Nadu, and having an ideological position that could put him at odds with regional parties from the Hindi-heartland, he is unlikely to be pitchforked into a leadership position of such an alliance. But stranger things have happened in Indian politics. His father, former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister (late) M Karunanidhi often shunned a larger role for himself in national politics, even when he had the opportunity. He once said that he knew his height and was content in Tamil Nadu. The son though, may be wanting to do one better.
Sumanth Raman is a sports commentator, TV anchor, and political analyst. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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