The spark that finally led Karunanidhi to take action had been an opinion poll published in the Maran brothers’ newspaper Dinakaran on 9 May 2007, asking who should be Karunanidhi’s successor. Seventy percent of the respondents chose Karunanidhi’s younger son and the current deputy chief minister, MK Stalin; his elder son, MK Azhagiri, placed a distant second, with a meagre two percent. Karunanidhi believed that the Marans had no mass base of their own, and that they were using their media (and money) to promote Dayanidhi Maran and set off a debilitating war of succession between Azhagiri and Stalin. Azhagiri’s own supporters seemed to agree: on the morning the poll was published, an angry mob of about 50 people attacked the Dinakaran office in Madurai, Azhagiri’s home base. They threw petrol bombs and set the newsroom on fire; two journalists and a security guard were burned alive. Kalanithi Maran’s deputy and the chief operating officer of the Sun TV Network, RM Ramesh, told the press that the attack was orchestrated by Azhagiri himself, and that they had evidence to prove it. Karunanidhi ordered an investigation, but his first move was to axe the Marans. After MK Azhagiris suspension from the DMK last week, revisit The Caravan executive editor Vinod K Joses 2011 profile of M Karunanidhi, the aging patriarch at the helm of Indias most fractious political dynasty.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:57:24 +0000
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