The Vijayakanth conundrum

Chennai: A film star and a political leader, who sought to cash in on the mass popularity quotient on the lines of legendary matinee idol-turned politician M.G. Ramachandran, to the point of even being termed, ‘Black MGR’, actor Vijayakanth and Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) founder-leader, now appears to be on the retreat.

Though Vijayakanth surprised his political friends and foes alike at the DMDK’s International Women’s Day rally in Chennai a few days back by declaring that his party will go it alone in the May 16 Assembly elections, after being wooed by almost every major political party, his avowed, ambitious transition from a ‘king-maker’ to ‘king’ in the state’s politics has thrown up the alliance field for fresh gambits.

But given the political milieu of Tamil Nadu, where two strong regional parties — DMK and AIADMK — have played a dominant role for close to 50 years now, with even national parties like the Congress, the Left and the BJP having to play ball with the two Dravidian majors, structurally, where does a party like the DMDK stand?

Earning the sobriquet ‘Captain’ after his 100th successful film in Tamil Captain Prabhakaran, when Vijayakanth launched his DMDK at a political conference in Madurai in September 2005, it was positioned as an “alternative” to both the Dravidian majors. More so, as no incumbent party has won a re-election to the state Assembly since MGR’s victory in the 1984 general election from a Brooklyn hospital. Even the DMDK was consciously named to reflect both regional and national aspirations.

Earlier to Captain’s initiative, the late veteran Congress leader G.K. Moopanar had tried a similar experiment in the form of the Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) when superstar Rajinikanth was at his zenith in 1996, with the slogan,  Valamaana Tamizhagam, Valimaiyaana Bharatham (a progressive Tamil Nadu to go hand-in-hand with a strong India). Moopanar was on the dot to crystallize both regional and national aspirations in one political go, and Rajini fans on TMC’s ‘bicycle’ was a big rural hit, after dexterous last minute legal efforts by P. Chidambaram to get the ‘bicycle’ symbol for the TMC.

But later, the revival of the Congress at the all-India level under Ms Sonai Gandhi’s leadership, logically, gave short shrift to Moopanar’s experiment. Ironically though, his son G.K. Vasan has now again re-launched the TMC to redefine his role in state politics. The TMC experiment had thus lessons to offer when it came to Vijayakanth’s variant subsequently in 2005. In a sense, ‘Captain’ had everything going for him – after his early life of toil and uncertainty in a lower middle class family running a rice mill in Madurai, his very modest school education that had to be wound up to look after his father’s business but taught him the commoner’s misery, his early Muslim friends who helped shape his film career that gave him an inclusive social outlook, and his climb to stardom with 150-plus Tamil movies so far that gave him the aura of a crowd-puller of the underdog and deprived sections of society. Elements of another ‘Black MGR’ in the making, as he was hailed at the DMDK’s founding rally in Madurai years ago.  
Going it alone in the 2006 Assembly elections, Vijayakanth readily proved his mettle, with DMDK gaining an individual vote-share of nearly 10 per cent though he was the only party MLA to win from Viruddachalam. It was a pointer that DMDK had straight beaten two other smaller regional parties – MDMK in the south and PMK in the north.

A consolidation of that phase saw Vijayakanth ascending even higher – thanks to the alliance with Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK in the 2011 Assembly elections. It saw him being catapulted to the Opposition leader status in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, pushing even a formidable DMK to the third place in the House.

Despite falling out with AIADMK even before October 2011 local bodies elections due to wrangling over Mayorship and Chairpersons posts, analysts point out that the DMDK’s political rationale – as an alternative to the Dravidian majors- got submerged when Captain decided to be part of the BJP-led NDA in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

One fallout of it was a broader social alliance of the marginalised including Minorities, women, youth and NGOs’, a promise that DMDK initially held, had been overpowered by the NDA umbrella, under which the dynamics of various OBC groups re-emerged in Tamil Nadu politics. Vijayakanth’s often gross outbursts in public, even thrashing his own party candidates and abusing media, worsened the image-problem for the ‘Captain’.