Chennai: Soon after the DMK announced that its second Youth Wing conference will be held at Salem on December 17, State Minister for Sports Welfare Udhayanidhi Stalin embarked on a whirlwind tour of the State to mobilize crowds for the event that is speculated to be a turning point in his career and to also prepare the cadre for the 2020 Lok Sabha polls.
Udhayanidhi Stalin was in Ariyalur on Monday addressing a large crowd of Youth Wing members, primarily inviting them to attend the conference in large numbers and also enunciating the political agenda of the party.
On Sunday night, he was in Trichy after meeting the members in Pudukkottai and Thanjavur ahead of that. In all the places he was received by a large number of office-bearers of the Youth Wing, who were incidentally appointed by the secretary himself recently after holding interviews with the aspirants.
Ever since Udhayanidhi Stalin took over the reins of the Youth Wing, started by Chief Minister M K Stalin in 1983, he has been strengthening it through a plethora of initiatives that included training programmes on Dravidian ideologies and history to young people.
Soon after the DMK headquarters announced the date of the conference, Udhayanidhi Stalin took to X (formerly Twitter) to thank Chief Minister M K Stalin for the great opportunity given to them and said that the youth wing would start work on the conduct of the conference immediately.
So he swung into action, meeting youth wing members immediately in the State’s central zone comprising the delta region. Making use of the meetings with members, he hit out at the BJP. In Trichy he spoke about the CAG report pointing to a Rs 7.5 lakh crore corruption under BJP rule.
Since the main challenge of the Youth Wing will be to mobilise the crowds at the Salem meet, the first thing that is being done is to reach out to the cadre. After the AIADMK managed to show an overwhelming congregation at Madurai on August 20, the pressure is now on the DMK youth wing to draw a better crowd.
Since the first youth wing conference of the DMK, which was organized on December 15, 2007, at Tirunelveli, saw the then secretary becoming the party treasurer a year later and also sworn in as Deputy Chief Minister on May 29, 2009, speculations are rife of Udhayanidhi too getting similar elevations subsequent to the Salem meet.
By showing a good crowd at Salem, DMK will also be symbolically storming a bastion of AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami. As of now western Tamil Nadu is seen as a weak spot for the DMK since both the AIADMK and BJP have better presence there.
