Chennai: Certain vignettes from the visits of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah to the State and the firm position that TNCC President K S Alagiri has been taking on the release of the six life convicts sentenced in connection with the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi are indicative of a possible political realignment for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
While the embattled top honchos of AIADMK, Edappadi K Palaniswami and O Panneerselvam, were at Madurai, hoping for a brief meeting with Modi when he came down for the convocation at the Gandhigram Rural University, for the next day’s corporate function of Shah in Chennai, only Panneerselvam went, which set tongues wagging in political circles.
It is learnt that though the BJP, which is in constant touch with the AIADMK leaders, had advised them to be united, lest they would lose the traditional votes of the party, Palaniswami had put his foot down firmly against taking back his bete noire into the party.
Palaniswami and his band of supporters in the party are confident of winning the case, now in the Supreme Court, and emerge as the sole custodians of the political legacy of J Jayalalitha and M G Ramachandran, including the ownership of the ‘Two Leaves’ election symbol.
So from a position of perceived strength and advantage, Palaniswami had reportedly rebuked the suggestion that he keep Pannerselvam and also V K Sasikala in the party fold and had even said that he would not mind walking out of the NDA if the BJP insisted on aligning only with a united AIADMK.
Not to complicate matters regarding the alliance, BJP State President K Annamalai had made it clear that the AIADMK would lead the alliance in the State and that it would be the faction that gets the ‘Two Leaves’ symbol and the Election Commission’s approval to retain the party name.
But in the event of Panneerselvam or Sasikala putting pressure on the BJP high command to prevail upon Palaniswami to take them back – if that does not happen both face the prospect of going into political oblivion – forcing the national party to insist on it, there is every possibility of Palaniswami walking out of the alliance, as he himself had indicated to his close aides.
That Palaniswami might not kowtow to the BJP as much as Pannerselvam has become evident from his not showing up at Shah’s meeting of the corporate house, in which his rival was present to at least exchange pleasantries with the BJP leader.
On the other side, Alagiri is repeatedly talking a diametrically opposite view of the DMK, even though he had not left the alliance, on several issues, particularly the 10 per cent reservation for Economically Weaker Sections and the release of those convicted in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.
While the DMK and its president Chief Minister M K Stalin are openly supporting the release of the convict and had even claimed some credit to the Supreme Court decision on it, Alagiri had been griping against it since the issue of another convict A G Perarivalan came up.
Speaking to the media after garlanding the statue of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on his birth anniversary on Monday, Alaigiri said that if the convicts were released because they had spent 31 years in jail, there were so many Muslim youth languishing in prisons for long periods, some of them without even a trail.
Also Alagiri is said to have not taken kindly to the leader of the Congress Party in the State Assembly, K Selvaperunthagai, toeing the DMK line on the EWS issue at the all-party meeting on Saturday. While Alagiri had supported the EWS reservation only the previous day, Selvaperunthogai opposed it and even said that the Congress party at the national level only wanted to study the quota.
Political insiders, however, say that the DMK-led alliance would be intact till the bugle is sounded for the 2024 elections since Alagiri would have nothing to gain by walking out now. But if the AIADMK shirks off the BJP and the DMK refuses to allot the Congress as many seats as it was given in the last election, which 10 out of 39, there could be an AIADMK-Congress tie up just before the election process begins.
For, the rumour is that the DMK is not keen on allocating a substantial number of seats to allies as it did in the previous elections. Also there is a possibility of a national level political churning, as 2024 nears, with regional parties coming together to form a third front. Whatever, all these possibilities now remain in the realm of speculation.
