Jayalalithaa Kept BJP Waiting. Now, Her Party Looks to Centre for Support

New Delhi: A senior BJP leader told reporters at party headquarters earlier this year that AIADMK would soon be joining the NDA and the government at the Centre. This was just after Jayalalithaa had won a fourth term in office and BJP was courting the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister with 10 MPs in the Rajya Sabha to tide over a miserable minority in the Upper House.

Inherent in the stoic silence of the Tamil Nadu CM to the BJP proposal was the message that DMK-Congress alliance does not render AIADMK a natural ally of the NDA.

From Vajpayee to Sonia Gandhi to Manmohan Singh, national parties and their leaders have found in Dravidian parties the toughest bargainers in realpolitik.

In her death, AIADMK is left much poorer in terms of a leader who could negotiate the power labyrinth of Lutyens’ Delhi with the élan and finesse of a hard-nosed politician. AIADMK without its leader perhaps will be more dependent on the dispensation at the Centre.

O Paneerselvam is the third time Chief Minister of the state. But he was never the leader of the party. Nor was Sasikala.

In the interim, the current situation also provides an opportunity for the BJP to expand base in the southern state. In the last Assembly elections in both Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the party worked overtime to enlarge its political footprint.

Quite unlike in the AIADMK, Karunanidhi has been more or less able to settle the leadership issue in favour of his son Stalin. For those looking at the void left by Jayalalithaa, forget that in the last fifty years Tamil Nadu has shown strong centrifugal tendencies since Davidian movement to hand over state leadership to the powerful Centre in control of the Delhi durbar.