Desperate DMK blurts out at media, Brahmins

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam suddenly looks vulnerable, despite having a very comfortable majority in the Tamil Nadu assembly. Or, at least that's the impression one gets from the party's three-day special conference at Salem, which ended on Sunday.

Though speaker after speaker lampooned the meet-eve patch-up between AIADMK supremo Jayalalitha and Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy, their ire was mainly directed against the media in Tamil Nadu, particularly the English language press. The DMK leaders seem upset that the media was backing the Jayalalitha-Swamy axis while leading a ''motivated campaign'' against their party and its government. Another reason was that the media gave very little coverage to the conference's first-day proceedings.

The DMK leaders -- including Chief Minister M Karunanidhi -- condemned the ''biased attitude'' of the Brahmin-dominated journalistic community at Madras. Taking exception to a front-page report in The Hindu on Friday that the Salem conference would anoint his son Stalin as his successor, Karunanidhi said the party was not being run on hereditary lines like newspapers.

The chief minister even resorted to Brahmin-bashing at his inaugural media conference. Did The Hindu ask how that ''Iyer'' got all the money for his frequent Delhi-Madras air trips? ''They only raise questions when a Sandra cuts a tree?'' he said, making light of the newspaper's expose on a DMK legislator's involvement in sandalwood smuggling.

Karunanidhi said the ''paarpaans'' (a derogatory term for Brahmins) found fault with everything his party and the government did. The reason: He and other DMK leaders did not wear the sacred thread.

What seems to be bothering Karunanidhi is that a Madras-based media family has been taking ''undue interest'' in promoting the ''Jayalalitha myth'' all over again. ''They give double-column page-one items on Jayalalitha, forgetting what she had done during her five-year rule,'' the chief minister said at Salem.

Said a Tamil Maanila Congress leader, ''There is definitely some truth in what the DMK speakers, including Karunanidhi, said. But they seem to have overreacted. The press-bashing has shown the party is vulnerable. It also shows that they are incapable of facing the political realities, and are afraid of their electoral future.''