DMK Pinned To The Backfoot By The Recent Turn Of Events

On Tuesday (19 December), a sitting minister of Tamil Nadu, and one of the old warhorses from the time of M Karunanidhi, was convicted by the Madras High Court in a disproportionate assets case.

K Ponmudy is the minister in question. Ponmudy and his wife Visalatchi had their acquittal in the 2016 disproportionate wealth case (pertaining to his tenure as minister for mines and minerals in the earlier Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam or DMK government) overturned by the High Court and the quantum of their sentence is expected to be announced today.

Ponmudy, who is currently the state's Higher Education Minister, and his son had earlier been questioned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with a 2011 case of money laundering linked to alleged illegal sand mining.

The ED's charge is that the minister has violated the Tamil Nadu Minor Mineral Concessions Act during his tenure as the minister of mines and minerals between 2006 and 2011. It has also accused Ponmudy of allocating an illegal red sand quarry in Poothurai in Vanur block.

When such a high-profile leader finds himself in the dock you would expect the media to go into a typical frenzy, right? Well, as it happened, the usually voluble sections of the Tamil television news media maintained a silence as the usual 'discussions' on such a rife topic were conspicuous in its absence.

That the Dravidian party is trying to control the narrative in both the mainstream and social media is well known. During the Chennai floods earlier this month, and now the deluge in Tirunelveli-Thoothukudi belt, the DMK's IT wing trolled down anyone with a (honest) critical point of view over the way the relief efforts were carried out by the government.

Some party supporters even went to the extent of threatening dire acts on journos who, while reporting from the flooded parts, had found the government's handling of the emergency situation to be inadequate. After such open threats, it is no wonder that the media chose to be relatively quiet even if the turn of events was explosive.

But the heavy-handed efforts to control the narrative were always going to be counter-productive. A leader like Ponmudy is no small fry. Among the senior ministers in the present DMK government, he has been the one who is taking on Governor R N Ravi with taunting words.

The 72-year-old leader is also a big-shot personality in the pivotal Villupuram belt, and runs a clutch of educational institutions and a bunch of hospitals headed by his sons Gautham Sigamani and Ashok Sigamani, both of whom are doctors.

Gautham is a Member of Parliament from Kallakurichi, and he and his wife head the Bloom chain of hospitals. Ashok heads the powerful Tamil Nadu Cricket Association (TNCA) as its president. 

More TN Ministers May Face Trouble

If the apex court upholds his conviction, Ponmudy will lose his seat and of course the ministerial position, too. If that happens, he will be the third legislator of the state to suffer a disqualification in the past 10 years.

The first legislator to be disqualified was J Jayalalithaa in September 2014, followed by the then sports and youth welfare minister P Balakrishna Reddy. But it is not just Ponmudy who may be facing the legal consequences of his actions. 

In August 2023, Justice Venkatesh ordered the reopening of another case in which Ponmudy had been acquitted. The judge also initiated revision of legal proceedings against two other DMK ministers, Revenue Minister K K S S R Ramachandran and Finance Minister Thangam Thennarasu, in similar cases. 

Another minister Senthil Balaji is already in jail. The controversial minister is under the lens of ED for one of those typical wealth accumulation cases. And now Ponmudy is the second wicket to fall.

So, whatever fate awaits Ponmudy, the DMK is already finding itself on the backfoot. Even though corruption cases are not a clincher in elections, they do end up building a perception, which at the current moment, is slowly moving against the DMK government.

Of course, the DMK has had no great track record in such matters in the past. The Sarkaria Commission words ('scientific corruption') are still not lost on many. 

The Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has also quickly latched on the Ponmudy issue, and its state leader K Annamalai, who spearheaded the campaign against Senthil Balaji, is again on the offensive.

"An edifice built over a false ideology, made corruption its way of life and suppressed voices of dissent through muscle power is falling like a house of cards," he said with typical yen for political rhetoric. The Ponmudy incident provides further ammunition for DMK's rivals in the state.

Nitish Kumar's Outburst A Retaliation To Gau Mutra Jibe?

But even without the Ponmudy issue, the recent turn of events in Tamil Nadu had put the Dravidian party under pressure. There is already considerable groundswell of opinion building against it with the way the floods were handled.

The absence of Chief Minister M K Stalin in the state at a time when the southern districts were going under the water has also triggered a small political kerfuffle.

Stalin was, of course, in New Delhi to attend the INDI Alliance meet. As it happened, the DMK found itself at the butt of another embarrassment at the meet where all the main political rivals of the BJP had gathered to talk shop. 

At the meeting which was represented by DMK's Stalin and T R Baalu, the Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar kicked up a storm over speaking in Hindi.

Apparently, the DMK team wanted Nitish Kumar's speech, which was in Hindi, to be translated. The Bihar CM is said to have snapped back that the southern leaders should learn Hindi and disown the remnants of colonial culture (English).   

That such a mood is prevailing among its own alliance partners is a major mortification for the DMK, for whom the language issue is always an emotive one. It has been accusing the ruling BJP of pushing Hindi down the throats of Tamils. And its strong campaign on the same in TN had struck a chord with the general public. So, this put-down by a notional ally will trigger a lot of political unease for the DMK. 

But it is also worth wondering why did the Bihar CM attempt to shame the DMK leaders.

There is already a theory that Nitish Kumar's outburst was not exactly aimed at the DMK and just a reaction to the fact that his party had not been given its due recognition despite him having taken the initiative to bring the opposition parties together and hosted the first meeting of the INDI Alliance in Patna in June this year. He is also not warm to the suggestion that Mallikarjun Kharge be the PM face of the alliance.

Another rumour has it that Nitish Kumar's barbs were indeed targeted at the DMK as a kind of retaliation to the southern party's offensive talk on Sanatana Dharma and the gau mutra states jibe.

"If our southern partner thinks so lowly of us, then don't expect any courtesy from us," is the implicit message behind Nitish Kumar's outburst. It can also be read as a veiled threat to the DMK to behave in the alliance group and not create any more fresh tensions. 

Of course, these are all conjectures. But what is undeniable is the DMK now finds itself hoisted with its own petard. And if the Ponmudy case takes a serious turn, the party may find itself in deep waters — deeper than the ones that Tamil Nadu has seen in recent times.