Coming to terms with saffronites

By M. R. Venkatesh

CHENNAI, JUNE 2. The mood in the DMK camp if not upbeat, is far from sullen as the party celebrates its president's and Chief Minister, Mr. M. Karunanidhi's 77th birthday. It was precisely a year back that the DMK's General Council formally put its seal of approval on a bold new venture with the BJP, which despite its electoral benefits, has continued to put the Dravidian party on the defensive ideologically.

If one of the key organisers of the celebrations, is quick to dispel any impression that the stage-design at the public meeting venue in the city resembles a `mandapam' typically found in South Indian temples, at the other end, the cementing rhetoric for the BJP-DMK ties comes from one of its candid public speakers.

``At present, there are only two leaders in the country, Vajpayee in the North and Karunanidhi in the South,'' remarked the speaker at a function got up today as part of the birthday celebrations.

While these two levels of responses seem to mirror the average DMK partyman's attitude towards his party's still uneasy relationship with the saffronites, the political fallout of some of the recent developments has evoked no knee-jerk reaction.

There is obviously an element of embarrassment though, for the DMK from two of its Tamil Nadu allies in the NDA - the PMK and the MDMK - over the Sri Lankan Tamils issue in the wake of the recent escalation of the military conflict in Northern Sri Lanka.

The ``self-appointed ambassadorial role'' of the MDMK chief, Mr. Vaiko in New Delhi in particular, in support of `Tamil Eelam' and the LTTE, from which the DMK had distanced itself long ago, continues to be a talking point in party circles.

``But what do you do?'' asks a senior DMK Minister. ``It's (Vaiko's pro-Eelam activism) like a necessary evil. In India, once you get married, a divorce is not so easy as the laws are such,'' he quipped to express the DMK's discomfort with the MDMK on the Sri Lankan Tamils issue.

However, the DMK's greater level of receptivity to things apparently religious came out during a poetry session last night in which Hindu symbolisms were played out, though in a somewhat compressed fashion.

One example: ``Celebrate Krishna Jayanthi as Krishna waters has reached (Chennai),'' extolled the Tamil poetess, Ms. Nirmala Suresh. ``It is a Jayanthi for the Krishna river though,'' she quickly qualified.

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