RS poll exposes chinks in Moopanar's strategy

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

The battle was won. But the scars, most of them from self-inflicted wounds, remain. And the one-year-old Tamil Maanila Congress -- whose supremo G K Moopanar was considered a political trouble-shooter in his erstwhile Congress -- has exposed the chinks in its strategy, where none originally existed.

No doubt, the TMC has won all the three Rajya Sabha seats for which elections were held -- but only with the support of its ruling DMK ally.

By upstaging the TMC with his announcement that the party had the right to demand the three seats and that the DMK was duty-bound to support the same, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi has proved, once again, as to who calls the shots in the alliance.

Karunanidhi also thus ensured that the DMK contested and won the lone Pondicherry Rajya Sabha seat for the first time. Helped by the TMC, the party easily defeated the Congress's retiring member.

Even Moopanar later lamented in pubic that he was left with no option but to agree to the DMK's proposal. He was possibly trying to placate Pondicherry's TMC Minister S Kannan who had been eyeing the Upper House berth from the Union Territory.

In a way, Karunanidhi was only giving the TMC what was due to it in the unwritten code of alliance politics: that any vacancy shall be sought to be filled by the alliance partner who had held the seat. The TMC had held all the three seats before the sitting members resigned over a row on their party identity.

The TMC was willing to give up one seat in Tamil Nadu -- to gain the Pondicherry seat. But the DMK would not concede it. Going by the unwritten code, however, the seat should have gone to the TMC. For, it had split away from the Congress, which held the seat.

Based on its own state assembly strength of 39 in Tamil Nadu, the TMC could have got only one RS seat. It naturally required the complete backing of the DMK for the other two seats.

Significantly, the bypoll also put paid to the loud criticisms of the DMK government by some TMC leaders.

During the poll, Union Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, a stern DMK critic, did not visit Madras. And other known critics were silent.

Worse still, DMK critic Peter Alphonse, one of the three TMC leaders who were renominated after their resignation from the RS, went out of his way to praise Karunanidhi.

While Moopanar preferred to stay out of the contest, if only to deny the DMK the pleasure of taunting him at a later date, the general expectation was that Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayanti Natarajan would be nominated to his seat, whose term would expire only in 2000.

This was necessary to ensure that the minister would not fight an election again next year, when the term of the seat held by her would end.

Yet, Jayanti Natarajan was initially nominated for the seat held by her, only to be given Moopanar's seat later.

TMC cadres are also puzzled over the nomination of state party vice-president N Abdul Khader for the eight-month vacancy caused by Jayanti Natarajan's shifting.

The party executive had authorised Moopanar to name the nominees for all the three seats, and TMC scheduled castes wing leader Paramalai was the front-runner for the third seat. That was until Moopanar ''corrected the oversight'' of the DMK-TMC alliance not having nominated even one Muslim for the 39 Lok Sabha seats they won last year.

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TMC calls truce as only DMK can bail it out in RS poll