DMK emerges stronger after Lok Sabha polls: MK Stalin

CUDDALORE: The near-total sweep of the DMK and its allies in the recent Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry have proved the doomsday predictors wrong, even as the party has emerged stronger after the polls, said the party president M K Stalin.

“Many predicted that DMK’s chapter is finished and it will disintegrate with this (Lok Sabha) election, but the astounding results of the DMK-led alliance has proved all the doomsday predictions about the DMK wrong,” Stalin asserted at a huge rally here on Saturday to thank the people for reposing faith in the DMK in both the Lok Sabha and in the 22 Assembly by-polls held recently.

“The DMK as an organisation cannot be destroyed by anyone, howsoever high he or she may be and I reiterate this with full confidence,” Stalin said. The question was not so much whether “I will fill the vacuum in the party’s leadership slot after the demise of Kalaignar (former Chief Minister and DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi) as some sought to portray. What is politically significant is that the DMK fashioned an alliance which has emerged victorious in this election,” he emphasised.

Stating that though the DMK had lost elections in the past, there is nothing historical to suggest that the organisation had been “destroyed” in the past, Stalin said, adding, those who attempt to “destroy” the DMK only land up on a self-destructive course. “No force can destroy the DMK,” Stalin again thundered, turning to the whole lot of successful MPs’on the stage including the VCK leader Thol Thirumavalavan, V Vaithiyalingam of Congress from nearby Puducherry and other DMK MPs’who have been elected to Lok Sabha this time.

Mr. Stalin said he did have an anxiety during the election campaign that it being the first election after’Kalaignar’s demise, he was all the more worried that Karunanidhi’s legacy should be protected. “The responsibility was even more strenuously felt by me as I happen to be his (Kalaignar’s) son,” he said, adding, the overwhelming success of the DMK and its allies have swept away such anxieties.

The DMK-led alliance was not an opportunistic alliance, but was placed on solid ideological and other issues, he said. They included issues such as the Cauvery waters, problems of State government employees, weavers, problems of the labour class, of women, besides opposing’Neet’exam, among others. The campaign was thus centred around issues that affected the people, he said.

Mr. Stalin said the DMK reached out to the people, with the party organising a record number of ‘Gram Sabhas’in the run-up to the elections and his own’padayatra’ in trying to understand their problems were of great help. Newly elected DMK MPs’have started voicing the problems and concerns of Tamil Nadu people in Parliament and this will only intensify in coming days, he said.

Though there were comments including in the media that the big Lok Sabha poll victory could not be replicated by the DMK in the 22 Assembly bypolls, Mr. Stalin said the very fact that DMK had, of the 13 won by his party, wrested 12 of those seats from the AIADMK, was itself a huge victory politically speaking.
This was proof that the people wanted the AIADMK to go, he stressed, reiterating that “nobody knows what could happen in the coming days in the State Assembly.”

Coming down heavily on the mishandling of the water crisis by the AIADMK, Mr. Stalin alleged there was a’scam’even in the Nemmeli desalination expansion project for which Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami laid the foundation stone few days back. “It was supposed to start in 2013 and what were they doing all these years,” he asked.

The party will continue to oppose the hydrocarbon projects in Cauvery delta, Salem-Chennai Expressway and the away-from-reactor facility to store spent nuclear fuel at Kudankulam besides any attempt to impose Hindi, the DMK leader added.