M Karunanidhi- Master Of Spectacles

Karunanidhi’s political career was much like the films he scripted—long, eventful, dazzling and divisive

- Lakshmi Subramanian

It was May. Muthuvel Karunanidhi and his DMK had just been dealt a crushing blow by his bête noire, J. Jayalalithaa. The alliance led by her AIADMK had swept the Tamil Nadu assembly polls, winning 203 of 234 seats. The DMK, which had been in power for the previous five years, was down to its lowest-ever tally—23 seats. Even Vijayakanth, the actor-turned-politician who had launched his DMDK just six years earlier, had won six more seats than the DMK, arguably the state’s most storied dravida party.

It was a mighty fall—Karunanidhi, the outgoing chief minister, was not even guaranteed the post of opposition leader in the assembly. A day after the results, though, he turned up for work as usual at Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters in Chennai. It was early morning, and he went straight to his chamber. Senior DMK leaders K. Anbazhagan, Arcot N. Veerasamy and Durai Murugan, along with three others, hesitantly went to him, unsure about how to break the silence. Being someone who is never at a loss for words, Karunanidhi then called out to his office assistant: “Aaru kaapi konduva, aaratha coffee konduva [Bring six cups of coffee; steaming, not ones that have lost steam].”

Grasping the implied message, the leaders burst out laughing. With one pithy sentence, Karunanidhi had replaced the pall of gloom in his chamber with a renewed sense of purpose. “He was successful only because he never looked back,” said Peter Alphonse, former Congress MLA who was once very close to Karunanidhi. “He never cared for yesterday. He looked at only today and tomorrow.”