CHENNAI: The bizarre round of expulsions that has rocked the AIADMK might seem strange to the uninitiated, but for those familiar with the Tamil Nadu political drama it was more like déja vu.
In 1996, a few months after the AIADMK faced its worst defeat in the Assembly elections, a few senior leaders, including S Thirunavukkarasar, now the president of Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, S D Somasundaram, S Muthusamy and S Kannappan, came out of the AIADMK and started functioning as a faction. Their party was christened by the Tamil media as ‘potti AIADMK’.
The rebel leaders’ charge was that the family of V K Sasikala was the sole reason for the defeat in the elections and that Jayalalithaa cannot lead the party effectively anymore.
On a particular day, the rebels convened the general council meeting at Raghavendra wedding hall in Kodambakkam and expelled Jayalalithaa and senior leaders of her faction. Meanwhile, Jayalalithaa, who was at the same time chairing the general council meeting of her faction at Vijaya Sesha Mahal in Vadapalani, expelled the rebel leaders. Both factions hurled charges against each other and claimed that theirs was the original AIADMK. The rebels also petitioned the Election Commission to freeze the ‘Two-Leaves’ symbol.
However, they could not stand the test of the time and within a couple of years, the rebellion died a natural death with Thirunavukkarasar, Kannappan and Somasundaram launching their own political parties.
This was not the only instance where party leaders revolted. Earlier in 1988, senior leaders like V R Nedunchezhiyan, Thirunavukkarasar, S Aranganayagam and ‘Panruti’ S Ramachandran rebelled against Jayalalithaa, citing the domination of the family of Sasikala, particularly her husband M Natarajan, in the party affairs. When they quit the party, Jayalalithaa described them as ‘fallen hairs”. At that time, the rebel group was widely known as naalvar ani (a group of four).
Many of them, however, returned to the AIADMK headed by Jayalalithaa, after the 1989 Assembly elections.