Tamil Nadu’s main opposition party, the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), is likely to strike an alliance with the six-year-old Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) ahead of assembly elections this year, members of both parties said.
But the tie-up, if formalized, will be little more than a short-term electoral strategy to take on the ruling coalition of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Congress, they said.
Tamil film actor “Captain” Vijaykanth launched the DMDK before the 2006 assembly elections as an alternative to the two established Dravidian parties, the DMK and the AIADMK. An alliance with either of these parties could tarnish its image as a fresh, transparent option for voters, DMDK party member K. Pandiarajan said.
“We will continue to have a unique identity of our own, and stick to our founding concepts in which clean and transparent governance is topmost,” Pandiarajan said. “Our rural vote share, built through the Captain’s fan clubs, is 12%, slightly higher than our overall vote share. But our founding concepts like ‘save Tamil, but learn all languages’ and ‘level up standards when education is made uniform across the state’ are targeted at the urban, educated electorate disillusioned with the present government.”
An AIADMK member, who did not want to be identified, said the party has no illusions about its relationship with the DMDK.
“We have to ally with DMDK because DMK has allied with Congress. We need those additional numbers (of voters)too. But it is a short-term strategy,” the party member said. “And we are going by what Amma (AIADMK chief J. Jayalalithaa) decides. So, it doesn’t matter to our cadre that DMDK was campaigning against us too in the last elections. We don’t think it’ll matter to our voters either.”
Contesting on its own, the DMDK polled 8.33% of the total votes cast in the 2006 assembly polls, and Vijaykanth won the Virudhachalam seat. The party raised its vote share to 10.19% in the 2009 parliamentary elections, although it did not win a seat.
Vijaykanth has been projecting himself as Karuppu MGR, or a dark-complexioned version of M.G. Ramachandran, the actor-turned-politician who founded the AIADMK and achieved considerable political success. The votes polled by the DMDK came from MGR fans from across Tamil Nadu’s social and political fault lines, and in a way cut into the AIADMK’s vote share. That’s another reason why Jayalalithaa’s party thinks it could benefit from an alliance with the political upstart.
Cho Ramaswamy, editor of Thuglak magazine and a political commentator, said the situation is too volatile for parties to decide on a long-term strategy. “If the alliance is struck, AIADMK and DMDK will remain distinct identities,” he said. “With new parties coming up all over the country and alliances shifting frequently, it is a time of churn and not of long-term stability.”
Source:http://www.livemint.com
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