Chennai: The well-attended Women’s Rights Conference organized in Chennai by the DMK’s women’s wing last Saturday actually went beyond providing a platform for top women leaders of political parties opposed to the BJP in the country to voice their varied concerns and enabled the DMK to cement its fraying relationship with some of its allies.
Delivering his presidential address at the conference held at the YMCA Ground in Nandanam, Chief Minister and DMK President Stalin asked the women leaders to go back home and appraise the top honchos of their respective parties about the clarion call given at the meet to defeat the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
But actually he was expecting them to tell their leaders more on the future alliances, too, though issues relating to women empowerment and rights did figure in the speeches made by the women leaders from different age groups, political backgrounds, social commitments and ideological persuasions.
One reason that the conference came as a boon for the DMK was reportedly because Stalin was able to convince former Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, who had come down for the event along with her daughter and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi, on the need for the alliance between the two parties to continue.
Besides receiving Sonia Gandhi personally at the airport on that late hour on Friday, Stalin also hosted a lunch for the visiting women dignitaries where the two leaders were able to discuss important political issues.
Though the DMK-led coalition in the State was apparently intact on the surface, a silent storm was brewing beneath since the beginning with many leaders of the alliance parties privately expressing resentment over the ruling party remaining unresponsive to their suggestions for giving them posts in the government boards and committees.
Subsequently, the DMK top honchos were also wanting the allies to settle for less number of seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections when the allies were interested in contesting in more constituencies. For example, though the Congress had fought in 10 seats in 2019 and won nine of them, the DMK was reportedly ready to allocate only six seats.
Similarly, other parties like the two Left Parties, the CPI and CPM, and the VCK that were given two seats each, were told that they might not get more than one in the next polls, much to their chagrin.
Such an apparent highhandedness was attributed to the DMK’s confidence that the allies would have no option other than rallying around it as they would lose their credibility in the State if they were to shift their loyalty to an alliance in which the BJP was a part.
But everything changed upside down when the AIADMK walked out of the BJP alliance on September 25 and started earnestly soliciting other parties for tie ups. So, the Congress, which always prides itself of having a better support base in the State than the BJP, saw an opportunity opening up to contest in equal or more number of constituencies than the BJP.
It was rumoured that some channels of communication were also opened up between the Congress and AIADMK, which the DMK saw as a bad augury. So it had to ensure that the Congress would not yield to the desires of some local leaders and join hands with the AIADMK. The meeting with Sonia Gandhi helped Stalin clinch that deal, sources say.
In the lineup of speakers at the women’s conference were CPI’s Annie Raja and CPM’s Subhashini Ali, both having personal connections with Tamil Nadu, though their parties had not joined the INDIA alliance. That was perhaps a message to the two Communist parties that the DMK treated them as allies and to tell them not to move to the AIADMK side, as it had happened in the past.
To put it in a nutshell, the conference helped the DMK re-establish its rapport with some of the important allies though the relationship was seemingly strained before the AIADMK-BJP split.
However, the final word on the electoral alliances has not been spoken and as the bugles are blown for the polls, anything might happen. For it is not just the DMK but also the AIADMK that is now fighting the BJP in the elections.
