Taking a cue from J Jayalalithaa, the late Chief Minister and AIADMK supremo, the DMK leadership has asked the party cadre to ‘work from now onwards’ to make a clean  sweep in the 2021 Assembly election.

Encouraged and enthused by the party’s performance in the Lok Sabha election held in April 2019, when the DMK— led front bagged 38 out of the 39 seats which were in stake from Tamil Nadu, Stalin asked in a personal letter to the party cadre to treat 2020 too as an election year though the Assembly polls are one year away.

“We can reap the benefits only if we start working from now onwards. I want all the party cadre to be out in the field for the whole of 2020 so that the party could wrest the power it lost in 2011 when elections are held in 2021,” Stalin said in n letter he wrote to the party cadre.

Stalin told the cadre that had the elections  to the local bodies was held in a fair manner, the DMK would have romped home by winning 90 per cent of the local bodies. But we have done extremely well by winning 60 per cent of the local bodies despite the ruling party (read AIADMK) misusing official machinery and pumping in money,” he said in the letter.

Old timers in Tamil Nadu  see a similarity between the exhortation by Stalin and the battle cry by Jayalalithaa immediately after the 2011 Assembly election.

After mauling and battering the DMK in the 2011 Assembly election, Jayalalithaa had asked the AIADMK cadre to go for the giant kill in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. “We should win all the 40 seats at stake from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. 

The AIADMK should be in a position to call the shots and decide who would be the Prime Minister of India,” Amma had exhorted the cadre.

“The AIADMK cadre did not disappoint her and the party bagged 37 out of 39 seats in Tamil Nadu and the lone seat in Puducherry. While the DMK was left without a single seat, the NDA scraped through in two constituencies in Tamil Nadu,” said Govindarajan Sathyamurty, political commentator based in Coimbatore.

The DMK is leaving no stones unturned in Tamil Nadu where it has been out of office since 2011. 

The party upped the ante on Monday by staging demonstrations all over the Cauvery Delta region (the five districts of Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, Nagapattinam, Pudukottai and Tiruchirappalli) where the Oil and Natural Commission (ONGC) is going  ahead with its projects to extract hydrocarbons, methane and natural gas from the fertile paddy fields.

The DMK and other constituents in its front allege that setting up of the the hydrocarbon and methane extraction plants would convert  the Delta region into a desert. They want the Centre to cancel the licenses and lease and licenses given to the  public sector as well as private agencies to extract the hydrocarbon and methane gas from the region.

Interestingly, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to set up the plants were signed in 20006 when M Karunanidhi, the then DMK president was the chief minister of Tamil Nadu and Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister.

“Situation was different at that time and that is why we changed out stance now,” said a DMK leader in Cauvery Delta. The Dravidian major is in a mood to make 2020 an eventful year in the run up to the Assembly elections in 2021.