Chennai : With Tamil Nadu likely to witness a multi-cornered contest in the Assembly polls, the DMK on Saturday revived its ties with the Congress ending the national party”s isolation in the southern State. The DMK had parted ways with the Congress in March 2013 after a nine-year-old association that started in 2004 accusing the UPA Government of not coming to the rescue of ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka.
On Saturday, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad had a 50-minute meeting with DMK president M Karunanidhi at the latter”s Gopalapuram residence in
Chennai. Emerging from the meeting, Azad declared that the two parties have agreed to form an electoral alliance. “Our goal is to put in place a DMK-led Government in Tamil Nadu,” he said, adding that issues like sharing power are secondary at this stage.
DMK treasurer and Karunanidhi”s son M K Stalin said the two parties will work together and an invitation has already been given to the DMDK led by actor Vijayakant to join the alliance. The latter was yet to respond to the invitation.
In the 2014 Parliamentary polls, the Congress had faced the voters alone and was routed in all 39 seats, though its candidate in Kanyakumari came second pushing the AIADMK and DMK candidates to the third and fourth places respectively. Until the emergence of the DMDK as a key player in the late 2000, the national party was the most preferred ally of the AIADMK and DMK for nearly 40 years. The Congress is now a weak party in Tamil Nadu, more so after G K Vasan split the State unit in November 2014 and revived the Tamil Maanila Congress, originally founded in 1996 by his father G K Moopanar.
While during the 2011 Assembly polls, the Congress citing the 2G scam arm twisted the DMK into parting with a whopping
63 seats, it is now at the mercy of the DMK and could have to settle for between 30 and 40 seats. If the DMDK agrees to
join the alliance then it would push the Congress to the third place in the alliance. Without the DMDK, the DMK-Congress combine may not be in a comfortable position to unsettle the ruling AIADMK.
