The BJP has nothing to lose after a point.
For the DMK it is a difficult choice, as it would not want to give too much of space to a 'national party' lest the 'Dravidian duel' of the past decades should be lost forever, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
After overcoming initial shocks, if any, over the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre's stubbornness in the IT/ED raids on minister Senthil Balaji and fielding Solicitor General Tushar Mehta at every hearing in the Madras high court (leave alone the Supreme Court later), the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu has begun hitting back.
Whether it hurts the other ultimately or not, party chief and state Chief Minister M K Stalin has personally begun 'giving back' to the likes of Union Minister Amit A Shah, on the latter's charges that the DMK is the 'most corrupt' political party in the country and the former was keen on getting minister-son Udhayanidhi boosted up further.
The question is about how the BJP-DMK duel would impact the more legitimate Opposition in the former's All India Anna DMK ally, as the party finds itself constantly and continually sidelined from mainline issues, ahead of the party's Madurai conference later in August.
It would be the first party conference after Leader of the Opposition and predecessor chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami (EPS) consolidated his position, organisationally and also legally, over other factions.
It would also be the party's clarion call for the Lok Sabha polls.
The question remains if the AIADMK would return the compliment by inviting the BJP's national and state-level leaders to the conference, after EPS had excused himself from the recent Rameswaram function, where Shah flagged off state BJP chief K Annamalai's En Mann, En Makkal ('my land, my people') padyatra, and in a way marked the party launching the campaign for next year's Lok Sabha polls.
Imaginative it is, because the choice of the temple island of Rameswaram has quietly fuelled the earlier speculation that Prime Minister Narendra D Modi might choose the Ramanathapuram Lok Sabha constituency to contest from, along with Varanasi that he has represented for two terms in a row.
For effect, Annamalai's padyatra will culminate in Chennai, traversing the northern region that is relatively weak for the BJP, compared to the southern and western regions that are the party's traditional strongholds but only in comparative terms.
It is the stronghold of the BJP's intended ally Pattali Makkal Katchi, whose president and former Union minister Anbumani Ramadoss, excused himself from the padyatra launch owing to a hurriedly organised protest against public sector NLC land takeover in Cuddalore district.
In a way, Ramadoss's protest and the police intervention to stop it caught the local media imagination than possibly the Rameswaram road show, at least on day one.
Not stopping there, Anbumani has since reiterated the party's position on the Uniform Civil Code, considered the BJP's main manifesto-point for the Lok Sabha polls next year.
Flagging off the padyatra, Shah said it was 'not just a political yatra' but aimed at taking 'Tamil language across the world. It's a yatra to take Tamil culture across the country'.
Yet, he stuck to the BJP's core electoral theme for next year, declaring that the 'yatra is being undertaken with the aim of freeing Tamil Nadu from dynasty politics and corruption. It is to improve law and order in the state. It is to mark the beginning of development in Tamil Nadu'.
On a significant note, he said that Annamalai would take Narendra D Modi'S message to every district and constituency -- as he added in the same vein: 'We will take the message of welfare politics of MGR and Jayalalithaa to the people,' thus drawing NDA ally AIADMK into the BJP's electoral discourse in the state.
This was so despite the fact that EPS stayed away from the launch, despite a personal invitation from Annamalai, citing health reasons. EPS was represented at Rameswaram by a former ministerial colleague.
Shah slammed the state government over the corruption allegations in the 'DMK files' released by Annamalai, and criticised Stalin for retaining Senthil Balaji as a minister even after his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate and imprisonment.
Shah refocused on the Congress-led UPA regime in which the DMK was a partner, in an era before the Modi government came up in elections 2014, in terms of 'dynasty politics' and corruption.
'Sonia Gandhi wants to make Rahul Gandhi PM. Stalin wants to make Udayanidhi CM. Lalu wants to make Tejasvi CM. Mamata didi wants to make her nephew CM. Uddhav Thackeray wants to make his son the CM,' Shah stated.
In a rejoinder to Shah's criticism about Balaji continuing in his cabinet even after being arrested by the ED, Stalin asked at a meeting of the DMK youth wing's new office-bearers if the home minister would direct the question to the PM, in whose team there were ministers with criminal records and court cases.
Otherwise, he kept the focus mostly on the BJP's embarrassing moments in Manipur, asking how come the home minister was busy flagging off padyatras in Tamil Nadu, as if to stoke communal flames in an otherwise peaceful state, when his presence and work were most needed to douse the flames of ethnic hatred and violence in the north eastern state.
Stalin dubbed Annamalai's padyatra as a 'paava yatra', meaning 'sinful yatra', though he explained that it was for atoning the BJP's sins of the 'Gujarat riots' and 'Manipur violence'.
He also referred to Shah's 'dynasty politics' comment at Rameswaram, as elsewhere, and said that if he were to start reeling out the names of heirs of BJP leaders holding positions, it would take an hour.
In this context, he mentioned how Modi was talking about the DMK wherever he went -- be it in Madhya Pradesh or the Andamans -- as he dreaded the acronym I.N.D.I.A., of which his party was a part.
Stalin's minister-son and DMK youth wing secretary Udhayanidhi, whose name too cropped up in Shah's criticism, hit back with a straight bat, delivered in a trademark linguistic simplicity that goes down well with the new generation, just as his multi-colour informal wear.
Both used to be an anathema for the previous generations of DMK leaders, starting with his grandfather M Karunanidhi but less so in the case of his father Stalin's generation.
If anything, rarely has Udhayanidhi been seen in a karai veshti, a dhoti with the DMK's colours at the border.
His stage language too is not anywhere close to being flowery and allegorical as Karunanidhi's and less formal, or less-than-formal compared to Stalin's.
Addressing the youth wing office-bearers, Udhayanidhi pointed out how he had become a minister after being elected an MLA by the people.
He asked Amit Shah straight: 'How did your son become the secretary of the BCCI? How many cricket matches has he played? How many runs did he score?'
Clearly, Udhayanidhi too was ready to take on the BJP's political fusillade, going beyond raids and arrests by central agencies, ultimately targeting the DMK's 'first family' one way or the other -- or, in more than one way.
He seemed to have been aware that he had to go beyond the confines of the party and youth wing office-bearers, and had to address a larger audience across the state.
He also asked how Jay Shah was now worth Rs 130 crore (Rs 1.36 billion) when it was only Rs 76 lakh (&.6 million) before Modi became PM in 2014.
Taking off from where Stalin and Udhayanidhi left off, relatively junior ministers like P K Sekar Babu and Mano Thangaraj too have started taking on the BJP with the 'paava yatra' kind of parable, indicating that the DMK intends making the BJP and the party's 'communal politics' the focus of their poll campaign for a third time in a row, after the successful elections in 2019 (Lok Sabha) and 2021 (assembly).
Thus far, Stalin had seemingly regulated and calibrated the party's criticism of the BJP at the Centre lest it should land the DMK in avoidable controversies.
Unless he did not find justification for personal intervention at his level, it was invariably left it to Minister Thangam Thennarasu, who has emerged as the government's spokesman, or R S Bharati, the DMK's organisational secretary, to issue rejoinders against whatever charges the Centre or the BJP might have levelled.
In between, the DMK has also been systematically sacking or suspending platform speakers for improper personal attacks on political rivals, at times bordering on indecency.
Now that other ministers have started opening up, DMK veterans might be free to attack the BJP in their own ways and styles.
Maybe, some of them may come under peer pressure to do as much -- as they seem to have enough skeletons in their cupboards for the ED, I-T and CBI to rummage into.
Yet, that would also be when they may need the party more than the party needing them -- unless they end up looking at other options at an advanced age, including retirement that they do not want to take voluntarily.
Clearly, the BJP and the DMK have begun taking each other seriously in these continuing war-of-words, thus serving a major purpose for Annamalai.
The fact that even the likes of Modi and Shah are targeting the DMK from various venues across the country only refers to how serious the BJP has taken the DMK and the electoral battle in Tamil Nadu -- and how much leeway and support Annamalai would get from the central party leadership, if not central government agencies.
In this changed milieu, the BJP's AIADMK ally is finding out how it may be cornered by the other two, over-shadowed by the 'lesser partner' in the BJP.
Party leaders expect BJP heavyweights to steal headlines from them at frequent intervals, well-orchestrated to confine the AIADMK's criticism of the DMK government to the inside pages of newspapers, or the second half of local news television bulletins.
In this background, if EPS did the right thing by staying away from the padyatra inaugural, owing to illness, is a question the AIADMK leadership should be asking itself.
The answer is yes-and-no, but EPS is not seen as a man to relent the AIADMK's top position within the state NDA, nor give away Lok Sabha seats to the BJP allies as the latter wished and face the music inside the party, which he has made a cohesive unit after a long battle with rival factions, respectively under O Panneerselvam, T T V Dhinakaran and Sasikala Natarajan.
The BJP has nothing to lose after a point. For the DMK it is a difficult choice, as it would not want to give too much of space to a 'national party' lest the 'Dravidian duel' of the past decades should be lost forever.
But keeping the BJP and Modi in focus and targeting the traditional AIADMK rival as a co-passenger has offered electoral dividends up to now.
The AIADMK is at the cross-roads. It is in two minds on the BJP alliance, but does not have the heart (guts?) to break away.
At the centre of it all is the fear of losing the party's 'Two Leaves' symbol, purportedly to the unending 'faction feud' but there may be more to it than meeting the eye.
The question is if the AIADMK would be willing to contest the Lok Sabha polls on another (common) symbol, though no one is talking about it in the open, as much.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
