In his public life spanning eight decades, DMK president M. Karunanidhi had staged numerous agitations and gone to jail several times.
While courage and determination were on ample display during these political struggles, there was hardly any hint of emotional vulnerability. But there are a few exceptions.
On July 4, 2001, a few hours after he was released from the Chennai Central Prison on “humanitarian grounds” — a good five days after his midnight arrest for an alleged flyover construction scam from his then residence on Oliver Road in Mylapore — he met journalists at DMK headquarters Anna Arivalayam. He was narrating the sequence leading up to his arrest from his bedroom by a Crime Branch CID team led by DIG Mohammed Ali.
Karunanidhi recalled that he was just wearing a lungi when the police walked into his bedroom, rattling him and his wife Rajathi Ammal. They informed him of his arrest.
He managed to make a call to his nephew Murasoli Maran, whom he had once famously described as his conscience, and alert about the arrival of the police.
Later, as he was pushed around and brought down from the first floor, Karunanidhi said he pleaded with the police to allow him to wear his inner garment.
“They agreed but did not give me any privacy. There were women police around,” he recounted, and broke down in front of a group of journalists. The next time journalists saw Karunanidhi in tears was when Murasoli Maran died.
Similarly, he broke down publicly after one of his long-time associates and party’s Salem strongman Veerapandi S. Arumugam died.
There were occasions when he took to writing to express his anguish. In January 2000, when his Dravidian Movement contemporary V.R. Nedunchezhiyan died, Karunanidhi, the then Chief Minister, arrived at the Chennai airport after an outstation visit. When journalists sought his reaction, he took a notepad from a young journalist and wrote down his condolence before heading to Nedunchezhiyan’s house.
Likewise, on the morning of June 30, 2001, when he was produced before a principal sessions judge’s house in Kilpauk for remand in the flyover case, he took the notepad of a journalist and wrote ‘ Aram vellum ’ (Justice will win), before the police took him to the Central Prison, where he famously sat down outside on the ground for around two hours as the police did not follow the judge’s advice to take him to the nearby Government General Hospital for a health check-up.
Though a veteran of many a political battle, Karunanidhi also cracked under pressure at times.
