Karunanidhi at 12 when he started writing

Karunanidhi and wife at Versailles.

Karunanidhi leading an anti-Hindi rally with a pot of tar, marked “Down with Hindi”, to cover up Hindi signage.

Karunanidhi with pictures of DMK icons (including himself).

Karunanidhi with NT Rama Rao.

Karunanidhi, 1989.

Karunanidhi with MGR (centre) at the muhurtham of a film, 1971.

On May 23, 1967, The Times of India published a report with the headline: “Tamils told to live like Maharashtrians.” Coming from the Shiv Sena, which was known for its agitations against Tamilians in Mumbai (Rajinikanth’s recent Kaala channels this memory), this would not have been surprising, but the report was about two ministers from the newly elected Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government in Tamil Nadu: VR Nedunchezhian and M Karunanidhi .Nedunchezhian told the Tamil audience in Bombay’s Matunga suburb that they should “live like Maharashtrians and earn their affection” while doing “nothing that would detract from the greatness of Tamizhagam (the Tamil nation).”And the day before, Karunanidhi told Tamil and Marathi scholars he was happy to see contacts between the languages. Karunanidhi and Bal Thackeray , the Shiv Sena supremo, met only once, in 1978 at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai. Despite the potential awkwardness over Thackeray’s Tamilbashing past, it seems to have gone off well.“Though we had differences of opinion, his love and simplicity during his visit impressed me a lot,” Karunanidhi recalled in a condolence message after Thackeray died.The two did have some interesting similarities. They were almost the same age, and both had come up in political struggles — Samyukta Maharashtra and the Self Respect Movement — that pitted the interests of state and language against the centralising influence of the Congress Party.Both had backgrounds in the arts: Thackeray in cartooning, Karunanidhi in writing plays and film scripts, which they had used for their political causes. Both were formidable orators, able to switch with ease between eloquence and sarcasm. Both knew the value of a strong visual image. Karunanidhi had his dark glasses and veshti and, later in life, a yellow shawl; Thackeray had his wide framed glasses and, later in life, orange robes.Both built strong, cadre-based organisations with formidable street level presence. Both used these cadres to unleash violence to establish their authority, although in Chennai and the rest of north Tamil Nadu, this was so well understood that Karunanidhi rarely needed to use it (south Tamil Nadu saw this muscle power more often, thanks to his Madurai-based son Alagiri).Both were known as anti-Congress politicians, yet their early opponents were really the communists. In the 1970s, the Sena was given a wide rein as its cadres broke the power of unions in Mumbai’s mills, and the DMK did the same in Tamil Nadu. The crime and violence in these battles were considerable, yet they may have saved industrial development in their states — in contrast with West Bengal, where communists faced no such resistance.Having built a party (Thackeray) or captured it (Karunanidhi), both leaders then risked the achievement by promoting their progeny as political heirs, provoking rebellions from frustrated non-family leaders.But neither seemed to care; in their minds, they were the party and the party was them. Above all, both foresaw a new kind of politics, based on pure pursuit of power, undeterred by history or ideology. Many articles written about Karunanidhi detail with a sense of bewilderment his shifting alliances and ability to team up with politicians he had recently attacked. Above all was his alliance in 1999 with the BJP whose Hindu roots would seem to be the exact opposite to Karunanidhi’s devout atheism and opposition to Hindi.Thackeray’s positions too often shifted in the Sena’s early years, but he really defined the new power politics in an exchange with SA Dange, the veteran communist leader.As Suketu Mehta narrates in Maximum City, Thackeray respected Dange for his support during Samyukta Maharashtra so asked him to speak at a Sena meeting in 1984. But when he criticised them, saying, “The Shiv Sena does not have a theory, and it is impossible for an organisation to survive sans a theory”, Thackeray’s response was devastating: “How is it that, despite a theory, your organisation is finished?” Karunanidhi probably understood this even better than Thackeray, as is shown by his multiple stints in power. But why did Tamil Nadu’s voters accept it? One constant in media coverage of Tamil politicians is the rather condescending attempts to explain the cult-like devotion they command.In May 1988, for example, ToI ran a long analysis tracing Tamil culture to “a feudal, tribalistic past… if efficiency is the watchword of modernity, loyalty is the watchword of feudalism”. The article suggested that the Bhakti movement channelled by the Nayanar and Alwar poetsaints, was now being transferred to politicians.Film star politicians like MG Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa were the main beneficiaries, but even when Karunanidhi was arrested, “a few of his followers immolated themselves”.What such analyses never answered was: if Tamil Nadu’s voters gave their politicians such status, why did they boot them out regularly? And the truth, perhaps, was that idolisation rather than ideology helped voters in a shrewdly transactional relationship with politicians. Ideology requires justification and debate to shift, whereas an idol simply requires belief, which is easy to transfer for a better deal.This explains the colour TV sets that Karunanidhi started giving out, and the even more frantic freebies of his successors. But it was also the relative peace and prosperity of the state, its high levels of literacy and other strong social indicators (including unexpected ones, like the way Tamil Nadu became the most transgender-supportive state under the DMK). It showed in strong bus networks and huge call centre complexes, and all this despite the chronic water and power shortfalls of the 1960s-70s.There were still problems, of course, as in the continued discrimination against Dalits and the problems faced by long-term projects initiated, but not completed, by the previous administration. Yet, Karunanidhi deserves credit for helping set a certain deep consistency in Tamil Nadu’s development, which was helped by his avoidance of the politics of rancour, as was shown in that Tamil-Marathi meeting in 1967.Karunanidhi could be vituperative against particular political opponents, but he didn’t carry that to entire classes of people. “We are against Brahminism, not Brahmins,” he said, a distinction that many embittered Tamil Brahmins refused to accept (including many in the media who shaped how he was depicted outside Tamil Nadu). For all the similarities with Thackeray, this was one key difference and a reason perhaps for his greater success.