A good first year for DMK, but there is room for improvement
The DMK has completed one year in government with more successes than losses. However, Chief Minister M K Stalin, also the party’s president, must continue to run a tight ship if he hopes to build a legacy that can be spoken in the same breath as that of his predecessors, his father the late M Karunanidhi and party founder C N Annadurai. Unlike the two stalwarts, Stalin benefitted from his position as heir apparent to the throne, Karunanidhi, a strategist par excellence having groomed him in politics and governance for decades. In his first year, Stalin has foregrounded the DMK’s ideological principles—social justice and federalism—while remaining one of the sharpest critics of the BJP’s brand of politics in the nation.
The tradition of the much-vaunted ‘Dravidian model’ of development, which views expenditure considered as “freebies” as investments towards a more just society, has been continued with a handful of significant schemes. The Makkalai Thedi Maruthuvam initiative takes healthcare to the doorsteps of the most vulnerable. The Illam Thedi Kalvi scheme, through volunteers, aims to bridge the learning gap among school students after two years of education disrupted by the pandemic. Finally, the scheme providing free bus transport for women and transgender persons has helped empower women by easing access to the world beyond their homes. Further, the state tweaked the design of an existing scheme providing gold for marriages of girls from vulnerable communities into one that will incentivise their entry into higher education. The administration also ably battled the second and third waves of Covid as well as urban flooding in the aftermath of the monsoon. Significantly, it has made these achievements amid belt-tightening necessitated by the state’s shaky finances.
However, there is still room for improvement. Custodial violence remains a huge concern, the police department clearly in dire need of reform. Similarly, when it comes to issues such as the handling of slum evictions, the DMK government has yet to put its ideological commitment to social justice fully into practice. Further, a slew of campaign promises—including the support of Rs 1,000 to women family heads, has been put off. The DMK must honour the faith of the people, who overwhelmingly favoured it in Parliamentary, Assembly and local body polls, and enact a true Dravidian model that allows social justice to reach every person in the state.