The death of two titans and the political vacuum they left — how Tamil Nadu navigated the interregnum between dynasties

The Collapse of the AIADMK

The death of Jayalalithaa in December 2016 threw the AIADMK into an immediate and existential crisis. The party had been built entirely around her personality — there was no second tier of leadership with independent political standing, no ideology beyond Amma-worship, and no institutional mechanisms for orderly succession. The moment she was gone, the factionalism that her authority had suppressed erupted with destructive force.

The central drama was the Sasikala episode. V.K. Sasikala — Jayalalithaa's long-time companion and the most powerful figure in her household — moved swiftly to claim the Chief Ministership, engineering the election of herself as AIADMK legislature party leader. Governor Ch. Vidyasagar Rao refused to invite her to form the government, citing the pending Supreme Court verdict in the disproportionate assets case. The Supreme Court then convicted Sasikala in the disproportionate assets case, sending her to prison and ending her direct political ambitions.

The Edappadi K. Palaniswami government that resulted from the ensuing AIADMK internal negotiations was a minority government surviving on political manipulation, defection management, and the tolerance of a weakened opposition. Palaniswami — a Gounder caste leader with a base in western Tamil Nadu but no statewide charisma — was a caretaker figure rather than a political leader in the Jayalalithaa mould. His government's record was marked by administrative drift, continued corruption, and the emergence of the Sasikala family's nexus (the so-called 'Mannargudi mafia') as a parallel power centre.

Karunanidhi's Decline and Death

Muthuvel Karunanidhi spent his final years in declining health, conducting the business of party leadership from his Gopalapuram residence in Chennai through an increasingly dysfunctional arrangement in which his sons M.K. Stalin and M.K. Alagiri competed for succession. The Alagiri-Stalin rivalry was vicious, deeply personal, and a devastating commentary on the dynastic corruption at the heart of Dravidian politics — the patriarch's sons fighting over the inheritance of a political machine built on public power and private enrichment.

Alagiri — the elder son, who had served as a Union Minister during the UPA years — was expelled from the DMK in 2014 following a period of open rebellion against Stalin's rising authority within the party. His expulsion removed the more aggressive and criminally connected faction from formal party politics, strengthening Stalin's position but also reflecting the depth of the family's internal contradictions.

Karunanidhi died on August 7, 2018, at the age of 94, the same age as his mentor Periyar at death. His passing was marked by a massive public outpouring, state funeral arrangements, and a dispute even over his burial site, with the family demanding burial at Marina Beach near the memorials of Annadurai and Jayalalithaa. The Supreme Court ultimately permitted the burial at Marina Beach. Even in death, the DMK's politics were conducted through drama and confrontation with state authority.

The 2019 Elections: DMK's Partial Comeback

The 2019 Lok Sabha elections saw the DMK, now firmly under M.K. Stalin's leadership, mount a significant electoral comeback in Tamil Nadu. The party won 23 of the state's 39 Lok Sabha constituencies as part of a broader anti-BJP coalition, positioning itself as the central force of Tamil Nadu's opposition to Modi's national government. The AIADMK, which contested in alliance with the BJP, won only a handful of seats — a dramatic reversal of its earlier dominance.

The 2019 results reflected both the genuine public anger at the AIADMK's post-Jayalalithaa mismanagement and the DMK's skilful assembly of a coalition that united Dalit organisations, Muslim political groups, and left-leaning parties behind its leadership. The election also demonstrated the BJP's weakness in Tamil Nadu — the party won zero seats, a persistent challenge in a state where its Hindu nationalist message has been consistently countered by Dravidian ideological dominance.

New Entrants: Kamal Haasan, Rajinikanth, and the Illusion of Change

The post-2016 political vacuum in Tamil Nadu attracted two of Tamil cinema's biggest names as potential political saviours. Kamal Haasan launched the Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) in 2018, positioning himself as a progressive, rational, technocratic alternative to the corruption-ridden Dravidian duopoly. Rajinikanth announced his intention to enter politics in 2017 with a more spiritually inflected platform that drew from his personal religious journey and his enormous popular following.

Both ventures ultimately failed to materialise as significant political forces. Rajinikanth withdrew from the political arena in December 2020, citing health concerns aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Kamal Haasan's MNM performed poorly in the 2021 assembly elections, winning no seats and failing to capture the anti-establishment energy it had sought to channel. Tamil Nadu's electorate, it turned out, was more deeply embedded in the Dravidian party structures than the celebrity-reformist narrative had assumed.

Part B

The Stalin government's record of communal appeasement, governance failures, anti-Hindu bias, and the case for a civilisational alternative

The DMK Returns: 2021 and the Promise of Change

The DMK under M.K. Stalin won the May 2021 Tamil Nadu assembly elections with a comfortable majority of 133 seats, ending the decade-long AIADMK rule and returning Dravidian governance under its original family to power. Stalin campaigned on promises of administrative reform, anti-corruption measures, economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and a new model of governance that would break from both the Jayalalithaa and AIADMK traditions. The expectations of reform were high among significant sections of Tamil Nadu's educated middle class.

Those expectations have been comprehensively disappointed. The DMK government's record since 2021 has continued the worst traditions of Dravidian governance — corruption, dynastic entrenchment, anti-Hindu administrative bias, communal appeasement, and the subordination of good governance to political calculation. The promised break from the past has not materialised; instead, Tamil Nadu has witnessed the most brazen examples of nepotism and administrative capture since the worst excesses of earlier Dravidian governments.

The Udhayanidhi Stalin Episode: Dynastic Succession on Open Display

The appointment of M.K. Stalin's son Udhayanidhi Stalin as a minister in the Tamil Nadu cabinet — and his rapid elevation within the government hierarchy — is the most blatant example of dynastic politics in contemporary Tamil governance. Udhayanidhi, a film producer and actor, entered the assembly in 2021 from the Chepauk-Thiruvallikeni constituency and was promptly elevated to a ministerial position in a government ostensibly committed to administrative professionalism.

His public statements have consistently courted controversy. In September 2023, he made a speech at a conference calling for the 'eradication' of Sanatana Dharma, comparing the Hindu civilisational tradition to diseases like malaria and dengue fever. The statement — delivered by a sitting state minister — provoked nationwide outrage and raised fundamental questions about whether members of the Tamil Nadu cabinet can make statements calling for the eradication of the faith tradition of the majority of their constituents and face no governmental consequence.

Anti-Hindu Governance: The Temple Takeover Regime

One of the most institutionalised forms of anti-Hindu discrimination in Tamil Nadu is the state government's control of Hindu temples through the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department. Under this system — unique in India and without parallel in the treatment of any other religion's institutions — approximately 44,000 Hindu temples in Tamil Nadu are under state government control. Their revenue, properties, appointment of priests, and administration are all managed by a government department.

The consequences have been devastating for Tamil Nadu's Hindu institutions. Temple revenues — which should serve the maintenance of temples, religious education, and the welfare of temple employees — have been diverted to general state expenditure. Ancient temple properties have been alienated, encroached upon, or mismanaged under government administration. The hereditary rights of priestly communities have been disrupted. Temples of immense historical and spiritual significance — including some of the most ancient Shaivite and Vaishnavite institutions in South India — have fallen into physical disrepair under government stewardship.

Meanwhile, churches and mosques in Tamil Nadu are free from government control, managing their own properties, revenues, and institutions without state interference. This discriminatory framework — which treats Hindu religious institutions as government departments while protecting the institutional autonomy of other faiths — is a direct product of the Dravidian political tradition's anti-Hindu ideology. No DMK government has shown any interest in remedying this constitutional inequity; successive DMK administrations have, if anything, deepened the state's extractive relationship with Hindu temple wealth.

Communal Appeasement and Vote-Bank Politics

The DMK government's governance has been marked by systematic appeasement of minority communities — particularly the Muslim community — in ways that have distorted administrative neutrality and created legitimate concerns about equal treatment under the law. The government's response to communal incidents, its appointments to key administrative and judicial positions, and its handling of religious sensitivities have consistently demonstrated a double standard that treats Hindu religious interests as less worthy of protection than those of minorities.

The Coimbatore blast case — in which an NIA investigation established links between Tamil Nadu-based radical networks and explosives infrastructure — received a muted political response from the state government. The DMK's reluctance to be seen as acting against Muslim community interests, even where those interests conflict with national security, reflects the electoral arithmetic that governs its communal calculations.

The government's appeasement of Islamic radical organisations operating within Tamil Nadu, its tolerance of anti-national speeches at certain religious gatherings, and its failure to adequately address the organised harassment of Hindu communities in certain coastal and border districts reflect a systematic subordination of national security and constitutional equality to vote-bank calculations.

Corruption Under Stalin: Old Wine, New Bottles

Despite Stalin's anti-corruption campaign rhetoric during the 2021 elections, the DMK government has presided over significant governance scandals. The sand mining mafia — a chronic source of corruption in Tamil Nadu's governance for decades — has continued to operate with apparent protection during the DMK's tenure. Complaints from district administrations about organised criminal networks controlling sand extraction along Tamil Nadu's rivers, with political connections that protect them from enforcement, have been consistent features of reporting on the state's governance failures.

The appointment of party loyalists to key positions in the Tamil Nadu government — including public sector undertakings, regulatory bodies, and government corporations — has proceeded at a pace consistent with previous Dravidian administrations. The promise of merit-based, clean governance has dissolved in the face of the same structural imperatives that have always governed Dravidian politics: maintaining the patronage networks that deliver electoral support.

The Road Ahead: Tamil Nadu's Need for a Civilisational Alternative

Tamil Nadu stands at a civilisational crossroads. The Dravidian political duopoly — DMK and AIADMK — has governed the state for over five decades, during which Tamil Nadu has failed to achieve the developmental outcomes its intellectual capital, geographic advantages, and institutional inheritance should have produced. States like Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka have surged ahead in industrialisation, educational quality, and administrative efficiency, while Tamil Nadu has remained mired in competitive populism, institutional decay, and governance failures rooted in ideological dysfunction.

The BJP's growth in Tamil Nadu — gradual but consistent — represents the most significant political alternative to the Dravidian duopoly. The party's challenge is to demonstrate that a politics rooted in Hindu civilisational pride, administrative professionalism, and genuine social inclusion can resonate in a state that has been systematically inoculated against it by decades of Dravidian ideological hegemony. This requires patient work: engaging with Tamil cultural pride on its own terms, recovering the genuine Tamil-Hindu synthesis that Subramania Bharati and the Nayanmars represented, and presenting a governance alternative that Tamil people can trust with their aspirations.

The ideological reclamation must precede the political one. Tamil people must be helped to see that their culture — the Shaiva Siddhanta philosophy, the Alwar devotional tradition, the Sangam poetry's celebration of dharmic values, the Chola civilisation's magnificent synthesis of art, religion, and governance — is not the enemy. The Dravidian ideology that has spent decades attacking this heritage is the enemy. Recovering Tamil pride from Dravidian misappropriation is the first step toward Tamil Nadu's political renaissance.

Conclusion: Truth as a Political Weapon

This seven-article series has traced the political history of Tamil Nadu from its proud freedom-struggle heritage to the manufactured crisis of Dravidian ideological hegemony. The facts are clear: the Aryan-Dravidian divide was a colonial invention; Periyar was an anti-national collaborator with colonial power; the DMK built its rise on separatism and anti-Hindu cultural warfare; its governance has been marked by corruption, dynastic entrenchment, and communal appeasement; and its most recent iteration under M.K. Stalin continues these traditions while adding new outrages against Hindu civilisational dignity.

Tamil Nadu's people deserve the truth about their political history. They deserve leaders who celebrate their genuine civilisational heritage rather than manufacturing a fake victimhood narrative. They deserve governance that serves their development rather than their rulers' enrichment. And they deserve a political alternative that respects both their Tamil pride and their Indian identity — recognising that these two are not contradictions but complements, two aspects of the same ancient civilisational inheritance.

The elections ahead offer Tamil people the opportunity to begin this renewal. The first step is understanding how they arrived at this moment — and what forces have systematically distorted their political consciousness. This series has been offered in service of that understanding.