CHENNAI: Very few outside Chennai know that Dayanidhi Maran owned a discotheque named Hell Freezes Over in the 1990s. It remained a popular nightspot for the metro’s ra ra crowd until J Jayalalithaa came to power in 2001. Today, hell has become hotter for Dayanidhi: he was ousted from the Union cabinet for misusing his office to the advantage of his business empire run by brother Kalanidhi, his DMK party is mum on his sacking except for the feeble voice of his uncle M Karunanidhi, his business dealings are being probed.
To make matters worse, Jayalalithaa has now moved against Maran’s cable TV network and television companies. The AIADMK chief minister has revived the Arasu Cable TV Corporation in Tamil Nadu which would put an end to the monopoly of the Maran brothers-owned Sumangali Cable Vision, which is dominating the cable network business in Tamil Nadu. Today, the DMK is left with only M K Alagiri, Dayanidhi’s cousin, as the lone Cabinet minister in the UPA alliance. The Karunanidhi dynasty seems to be in peril with daughter Kanimozhi in jail and Dayanidhi—son of late Murasoli Maran—facing the wrath of a government eager to restore its scam-tainted image as well as subduing a once-powerful, dictatorial ally the DMK.
What was behind the spectacular rise of the Maran family in politics and business, what lies ahead for Dayanidhi and what can he do to protect himself and the companies his brother Dayanidhi Maran owns—the Sun TV Group, Sun Pictures and Spice Jet—which is the financial clout that makes the brothers a force to reckon with. Maran came under a cloud when Indian promotor of Aircel C Sivasankaran accusing him of arm-twisting him into parting with his stakes in Aircel to a Malaysian company, paving the way for the CBI to bring the former telecom minister under its investigation umbrella on the 2G Spectrum scam.
DMK leaders have never trusted Maran, who has always been perceived as a political interloper.
Dayanidhi gatecrashed into politics in 2004 by getting a wild card entry to contest the Chennai Central that fell vacant after his father Murasoli Maran—Karunanidhi’s nephew—died in 2003. At the instance of his uncle, Dayanidhi was nominated by his party to be the Telecommunications minister in UPA-I ministry despite the ‘conflict of interest’ factor as elder brother Kalanithi headed the Sun TV group that has diverse media interests—much to the resentment quite a few senior DMK leaders.
But all was not well in the dynasty between Karunanidhi’s children and his nephews, the Marans. In 2007, the Maran-owned Tamil newspaper, Dinakaran, published the results of an AC Nielson opinion poll that said 70 per cent of the respondents wanted M K Stalin to succeed Karunanidhi as DMK chief. Angry DMK mobs set the Dinakaran office in Madurai on fire and three employees of the newspaper were killed. The DMK ordered Dayanidhi to step down from the Union the cabinet. In retrospect, the 2G Scam can be traced back to that day; the Telecommunication portfolio was handed over to A Raja.
The DMK then asked the Maran brothers to vacate the Sun TV office, then located in Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters building in Chennai. Kalanithi Maran started Sun TV as a small venture in 1992. The internecine power struggle between Karunanidhi’s wives and children led to a rapprochement with the Marans in December 2008. Karunanidhi’s daughter Selvi, married to Murasoli Selvam, Murasoli Maran’s younger brother, also counselled her father to forgive the Maran brothers.
Since his forced resignation, Maran had been courting his uncle’s favour, helped by cousin Stalin. In July 2008, when the UPA government faced a no-confidence motion in Parliament, the DMK ignored Dayanidhi’s vote as part of its muscle, prompting him to hold a press conference at his Chennai home to announce that he was still with the DMK. In October 2008, when DMK MPs resigned to Karunanidhi in a political drama to try to make the Indian government stop the Sri Lankan government’s military campaign that finished off the LTTE, Dayanidhi went to Karunanidhi’s house to hand over his resignation to prove that he remained a loyal DMK MP, but Kalaignar wasn’t impressed.
By the time elections were announced in 2009 Dayanidhi was back in favour and allotted the Chennai Central Lok Sabha constituency. Neither the party, not Alagiri approved. There is a major cultural divide between the cousins—the Maran brothers studied at the elite Don Bosco school and Loyola College, both in Chennai. With an economics degree, Dayanidhi went to Harvard to study for an MBA. He is married to an Iyengar girl—Priya—from the Hindu newspaper family. Dayanidhi’s younger sister Anbukkarasi is a doctor who lives abroad. Alagiri’s fluency in English is limited.
Since Dayanidhi came to the limelight in the DMK suddenly after his father Murasoli Maran’s death, he does not have loyalists in the party. Having entangled himself in the 2G imbroglio, compounded by the fact that he lacks a mass base in the party, the political future of Dayanidhi Maran looks bleak.