The row over the July 2017 “secret meeting” between Deputy Chief Minister and the AIADMK coordinator O. Panneerselvam and rebel leader T.T.V. Dhinakaran has raised a question: is the former facing a trust deficit among his colleagues?
A view among a section of his colleagues indeed is that he has let them down by keeping them in the dark about the July meeting. A leader who was part of the AIADMK (Puratchi Thalaivi Amma) headed by Mr. Panneerselvam during March-August 2017 said Mr. Dhinakaran’s claim about a recent overture made by the Deputy Chief Minister could not be dismissed lightly.
Another leader points out that there is a perception among members of the now-defunct AIADMK (PTA) that it is inexplicable as to why Mr. Panneerselvam has been playing “second fiddle” to the Chief Minster and the party co-coordinator Edappadi K. Palaniswami.
There is also a grievance that he has not been able to secure “suitable” positions in the party and the government for those who stood by him in those six months of 2017.
However, J.C.D. Prabhakar, former MLA from Villivakkam and one of the organising secretaries of the party, and S. Semmalai, MLA of Mettur in Salem district and a long-serving organising secretary, assert that the episode has not caused any dent to the image of Mr. Panneerselvam.
“I do not see anything amiss about him not having informed his colleagues like me. The context that needs to be kept in mind is that he was heading a faction of his own with Mr. Palaniswami and Mr. Dhinakaran functioning separately,” Mr. Semmalai explains.
“What is critical is the outcome of the meeting,” says Mr. Prabhakar. Eventually, the Deputy Chief Minister did not go along with the rebel leader. Secondly, “if you look at the sequence of events, it was after this episode that the Deputy Chief Minister hastened the process of unification of the two factions – AIADMK (PTA) and the AIADMK (Amma),” points out the former legislator, whose association with Mr. Panneerselvam can be traced to the period when Mr. Prabhakar functioned as the State secretary of the youth wing in the 1980s, and the Deputy Chief Minister served as the deputy secretary of the unit in Theni district.
TTV ‘disturbed’
Both Mr. Semmalai and Mr. Prabhakar assert that the way Mr. Panneerselvam and Mr. Palaniswami are running the affairs of the party and the kind of preparations being made for the anticipated Tiruparankundram byelection have “extremely disturbed” Mr. Dhinakaran and his colleagues. This is why the disclosure about the meeting has been made now, they claim.
Another member of the Panneerselvam camp says the row over the secret meeting is the third crisis that the Deputy Chief Minister is witnessing in the last two-and-a-half years. The first one came a few months before the May 2016 Assembly elections, when he “lost the confidence of Jayalalithaa temporarily”.
He found himself in a tight spot again when he had to quit as Chief Minister in February 2017. But just as he survived in the past, he would weather the latest controversy too, aver some of his supporters.
