Chennai, a DMK bastion

By T. Ramakrishnan

CHENNAI, MAY 3. Chennai has always occupied a special place in the DMK's political graph.

It was in Royapuram, in north Chennai, that the organisation was born in September, 1949. It was the Chennai Municipal Corporation that gave DMK an initial taste of power 10 years later. It was Chennai that stood by the party even in 1977 and 1991, the bad years. And, the DMK president and Chief Minister, Mr. M. Karunanidhi, has been getting elected to the Assembly from one city constituency or the other since 1967.

Also, many front-ranking leaders of the DMK, despite hailing from mofussil areas, made Chennai their base, be it Mr. Karunanidhi or the late C. N. Annadurai.

An associated factor was that some of these leaders were connected with the Tamil film industry, which had its headquarters in the city. Not surprisingly, the leaders' prime focus was to make Chennai the DMK's pocket-borough.

Signs of the DMK acquiring a permanent feature in the city's polity were evident in 1957 when the party contested the Assembly election for the first time. It then won three constituencies - Thousand Lights, Egmore and Perambur.

In 1967 when the party rode to power, it scored 10 out of 10 (Chennai district then had only 10 seats). Since then, the DMK has won a majority of the constituencies in Chennai, barring 1991, when the entire State witnessed the ``Rajiv Gandhi assassination wave''. Even then, the DMK got two seats, both from the city.

Notwithstanding the vicissitudes witnessed both in Chennai's character as also the State's politics in the last four decades, Chennai, thus, remains a bastion of the DMK.

Different reasons explain this feature. Foremost being that the party has identified itself with the city. ``In power or out, the DMK has always been talking about Chennai's development. Its interest about the city is much deeper'', the DMK's watchers say.

In 1959, the party captured the Madras Municipal Corporation by a plan. It won 45 out of a total of 100 seats in the Council and Mr. Arasu became the party's first Mayor of Chennai. This was a turning point in the DMK's history.

A former Congress MLA of T.Nagar, Dr. K. Sourirajan, who was then an active councillor, says ``the then Chief Minister, K. Kamaraj, did not take the development seriously, but dismissed it as of little consequence''.

Within eight years, the DMK's march from Ripon Building (headquarters of the Chennai Corporation), ended at Fort.St. George, (the seat of the State Government), ousting the Congress.

Using this ``prime mover's advantage'', the DMK ensured that it got firmly entrenched in the city. Apart from the urban poor, the party has cultivated a solid following among the city's ``reading class'', in contrast to the late M. G. Ramachandran or the AIADMK which has a base among ``viewing class'', reason out the DMK's watchers.

Precisely, it was due to this factor that MGR never contested from a city constituency like Thousand Lights or Triplicane. In 1967, he chose St. Thomas Mount (now Alandur). ``May be, the area is now part of a metropolis but, it had a complete suburban character then'', they say.

Yet another pointer to the DMK's hold over Chennai: The AIADMK, when in power, did not conduct elections to the Corporation's Council. In fact, a major promise held out by DMK during the 1996 Assembly electioneering was holding of the civic body polls.

The DMK demonstrated its ``special affinity'' with the city once more when it nominated Mr. Karunanidhi's son, Mr. M. K. Stalin, for the Mayoral election in October 1996. Chennai was the DMK's ``automatic and natural choice'' to bring Mr. Stalin to the limelight.

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