EPS & HIS COALITION OF THE UNWILLING

The anti-DMK front threatens to fragment as friends flee and dissent stalks AIADMK

- By Kavitha Muralidharan

A "GRAND ALLIANCE" AGAINST the ruling DMK is what AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami (EPS) has been promising. But as the assembly election approaches and the mustard starts popping on Tamil Nadu's political skillet, his very ambition could be turning into a self-terminating seed. Result: what ought to have by now looked like an EPS-led battle phalanx, the NDA's local translation, is beginning to look more like a mosaic of potsherd fragments from another time.

The AIADMK's prenuptial pact with the BJP was itself a product of fraught renegotiation rather than rediscovered love. But EPS's helmsmanship is producing contrary effects both within his party and outside. Mutiny is darkening the mood in the AIADMK. The party has ruled Tamil Nadu for over three decades since the Dravidian movement's rise to power in 1967, but veterans don't seem too amused at EPS's self-image as the undisputed inheritor of that legacy—a 'supremo' a la MGR or Jayalalithaa. Others, too, are fleeing his big tent.