In the end, Dravidian quartet are neighbours in beach sand

CHENNAI: Even in death, M Karunanidhi was a fighter, the last battle being for his final resting place. And when his coffin was lowered into the Marina sands, it marked the completion of a jigsaw, a quartet of Dravidian chief ministers. Those DMK cadres who wailed that they’ve been orphaned by Karunanidhi’s death can take heart in that their ‘thalaivar’ will be resting next to his mentor C N Annadurai.

And they cannot ignore that his other neighbours are MGR and J Jayalalithaa. The midnight court battle over allocating space on Marina brought out the old bitterness between Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa, but death seems to have mended fences the leaders couldn’t when alive. When it comes to MGR, however, DMK cadres don’t feel so bad. After all, the two leaders have been more than civil even after their political split.

When MGR was in a US hospital fighting for his life, Karunanidhi had appealed to forget the years of their rivalry (that incidentally kept Karunanidhi out of power for almost 12 years) and relive their years of friendship. In fact, Karunanidhi ensured that MGR got a grand memorial on the Marina.
The two couldn’t forget the symbiosis their association yielded: Karunanidhi wrote dialogues pregnant with Dravidian ideology and MGR delivered them to the masses. The party grew, and so did MGR. But Karunanidhi couldn’t allow the star to outshine the rising sun. Had Anna been alive, felt many Dravidian thinkers, the split would have never happened.
Together, the quartet wrote much of post-Independence Tamil Nadu’s political history. Since 1967, the DMK and the AIADMK have alternated in power.

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