In Tamil Nadu, a rising sun and setting stars

As Tamil Nadu’s 39 seats head to the polls on April 18, The Indian Express travels across the state to find that unlike earlier elections, the Opposition alliance led by the DMK has stitched up a narrative centred on a key question: ‘Don’t you want to keep out Modi?’ For now, the answer is up in the air.

It’s a little past 10 in the morning, but the summer sun is already beating down hard on Vilathikulam near Thoothukudi in southern Tamil Nadu. But G Vinodh, a carpenter, says he did not think twice about bringing his family along to attend the roadshow of DMK’s Thoothukudi candidate Kanimozhi, daughter of the late DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi who is fighting her debut election. Beside Vinodh stands his mother Maheswari, cradling his three-month-old daughter. The baby, red and hot in a pale green shawl printed with a photo of the late AIADMK leader and former chief minister J Jayalalithaa, drifts in and out of sleep amidst the heat and noise.

As they stand by the road opposite the Vilathikulam bus stand, waiting for Kanimozhi’s convoy to enter the narrow lanes of the town, Maheswari and her friend Ramaneeswari, both daily wage workers, discuss Kanimozhi’s Thoothukudi connection. Kanimozhi’s mother Rajathi Ammal, Karunanidhi’s third wife, is from Thoothukudi and the DMK has fielded Kanimozhi with an eye on the Hindu Nadar community to which her mother belongs. “But Rajathi Ammal left Thoothukudi years ago and now lives in Madras (Chennai),” informs Maheswari.

Do they like Kanimozhi? Ramaneeswari smiles. “What is there to like or dislike? They will all come like this and go… But we will vote for her to defeat Modi,” she says, not sounding too convinced about Kanimozhi but clear about who won’t get her vote — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party candidate and BJP state president Tamilisai Soundararajan. Maheswari nods, saying their vote is for the DMK’s rising sun symbol. The green shawl that the baby is wrapped in was part of an ‘Amma Baby Kit’ that they received from the Thoothukudi government hospital where she was born. But in Tamil Nadu’s sop-fuelled political landscape, these little contradictions are a way of life.

As Tamil Nadu’s 39 Lok Sabha seats, along with one seat in Puducherry, vote in the second phase on April 18, it’s clear that this is an election unlike any the state has witnessed in recent decades. For one, this is the first election without either of the two towering Dravidian leaders and rivals — DMK’s Karunanidhi, who passed away in August 2018, and Jayalalithaa, whose death in December 2016 sent the AIADMK spiralling into crisis, turning it into a pale shadow of the party that won 37 of the 39 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

The circumstances since then have also meant that the state’s election campaign this time has a new language. Unlike in the past, it’s the national parties that are setting the agenda — the BJP, though only fighting from five seats, has the clear upper hand in its alliance with the AIADMK and Captain Vijaykanth’s DMDK; and the mega Opposition alliance led by the DMK has rallied round the Congress, which is fighting on nine seats, and which includes Left, Dalit and minority parties.

In another departure from the past, when sops and strictly local issues set the tone, this time, the Opposition alliance has spun its narrative around a simple question: “Don’t you want to keep out Modi?”