Throes of despair

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Throes of despair

Saturday, 28 May 2022 | Pioneer

Throes of despair

The Congress has badly fallen from its position of strength in Tamil Nadu

The Congress, which ruled Tamil Nadu continuously for almost two decades after Independence, is now virtually on its last breath in the State. The party, once led by titans like C Rajagopalachari, K Kamaraj, S Satyamurti and C Subramaniam, is now run by minnows who would not be able to win even a civic body election without the DMK’s support. The Dravidian major has literally sucked out the blood from the ‘grand old party’ that once had a commanding presence in the State. The Congress has been made to eat humble pie by the DMK, which has thrown its way just a single Rajya Sabha seat from the State in the upcoming biennial election. And it’s not new; just another episode in the series of humiliations heaped upon the Congress by the DMK since the parties forged an alliance in the State in 2004. Since the DMK was launched in 1949 as an offshoot of the Dravida Kazhagam led by EV Ramasami Naiker, a self-proclaimed backward community leader from then Mysore Province, the DMK had only one mission and that was to annihilate the Congress.

The first time the DMK joined hands with the Congress in modern times was during the 2004 Lok Sabha election which saw the Front consisting of other fringe parties like the MDMK and PMK, obliterating the AIADMK by winning all the 38 seats. The DMK, sulking from an unexpected defeat in the 2001 Assembly election, was striving to register a win in 2004 and had allotted nine seats to the Congress, which won all of those. But the DMK, which had won 16 seats, used the opportunity to extract the maximum benefit from the Congress by demanding the most “healthy” Ministries (which were known by the acronym ‘ATM Ministries’). The DMK had even threatened to walk out of the UPA if its demands were not met. The rest is history. The infamous 2G scam was DMK’s major contribution in the UPA Government’s downfall. The party also played a major role in vitiating the ties between India and Sri Lanka, putting Tamil chauvinism to good use. The Congress leadership in the State comprises political migratory birds who return to Sathyamurthy Bhavan, the TNCC headquarters, for nesting. The party needs a thorough overhaul and freedom from the colonial rule of the Dravidian major.

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