When the principal political rivals mimic each other in policies and programmes, and not just failures and misdeeds, they leave space for the emergence of a powerful third force. Tamil Nadu is still some distance away from seeing a party other than the >Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) of M. Karunanidhi and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) of Jayalalithaa coming to power, but the two parties are so cast in each other’s image that voters are increasingly beginning to feel that one is not an alternative to the other in any substantive sense.
But things were not always so.
From alternative to mirror image In 1972, when >M.G. Ramachandran broke away from the DMK to start his own party, the Anna DMK, he did not exactly split the parent party vertically. While he took away a substantial chunk of the DMK with him, what hurt the party the most was the manner in which he managed to bring together all those opposed to it under his leadership. The DMK managed to retain much of its urban, middle class support base in the post-split period, but still lost to MGR, whose party subsumed the support bases of the Congress factions to emerge as its principal opposition.
Thus, despite being a breakaway group of the DMK, the ADMK, which later labelled itself as the All India Anna DMK, had a very different support base. In contrast to the urban, organised working class and middle class base of the DMK, the AIADMK leaned heavily on the rural poor and unorganised workers. Both parties were Dravidian in name and invoked the achievements of the >DMK’s founder and first Chief Minister, C.N. Annadurai , but they catered to very different political and social constituencies. Ideologically and programmatically, the AIADMK was in every sense an alternative to the DMK. If the DMK stressed on governance and infrastructure, the AIADMK swore by welfare schemes and dole-outs.
However, in recent years, the two parties have begun imitating each other: the AIADMK, during the second term of Ms. Jayalalithaa as Chief Minister between 2001 and 2006, gave up the populist schemes of MGR and embarked on a course of making public utilities more efficient and less subsidy-dependent. Although she rolled back some of the measures after the rout in the Lok Sabha election of 2004, the AIADMK was no longer the same party. It actively sought to cultivate the urban, educated middle class voters, promising greater efficiency in the management and delivery of government services, even if at a higher cost to the consumer.
When the DMK returned to power in 2006, the party adopted the MGR formula of cultivating the rural poor with schemes that directly benefited them. Besides lowering the price of rice made available through the Public Distribution System, and strengthening the noon meal scheme, Chief Minister Karunanidhi ran a government of freebies, foremost among them being the handing out of colour televisions to every household with a ration card.
Also, the rise of Mr. Karunanidhi’s elder son, >M.K. Alagiri , within the party hierarchy in the southern districts coincided with the adoption of political patronage as an electoral device by the DMK leadership. The growth in the influence of lumpen elements within the DMK also increased around the same time, making the party indistinguishable from the AIADMK in this respect.
In corruption, in misuse of power, the two parties began to mirror each other in their years in power in the new century.
The leadership-base disjunction Ideologically too, there was little to tell the two parties apart. The AIADMK began as a softer version of the DMK, on account of its assimilation of the Congress support base, by diluting its rationalist, and anti-Hindi nationalist rhetoric. But with the DMK itself diluting its stand on such issues, and forging politically-dependent alliances first with the Congress and then with the Bharatiya Janata Party, such distinctions no longer made sense. And as parties with a regional identity, they defied any slotting within the Left-Right spectrum, and often adopted policies that went against the interests of their support bases. The resultant leadership-base disjunction only increased the similarities between the two parties.
Thus, if the two parties are beginning to look more and more like each other, it is because their support bases have, in some ways, coalesced into one amorphous mass that can shift loyalty from one election to another. This explains why neither party can claim to have its traditional bastions of support. The DMK can no longer be sure of winning in Chennai and other cities, just as the AIADMK cannot be confident of winning in the rural areas of the southern districts.
There is certainly a high degree of voter fatigue with the two Dravidian parties; but an alternative will take a long time to build up. The >Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) led by actor-politician Vijayakant does not inspire confidence, with the party seeking to be all things to all people at all times, a mishmash of identities. Just as its choice of name suggests, it sees no contradiction in laying claim to the nationalist, progressive and Dravidian legacies. The third front of the DMDK, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, a Dalit party, the two Left parties, and the Tamil Maanila Congress, reflects the same mishmash. It will certainly take a lot more political churning to throw up a viable alternative to the two major Dravidian parties.
suresh.nambath@thehindu.co.in
