NEW DELHI: Soon after the 2004 general elections in which the DMK-led Democratic Progressive Alliance swept all the 40 seats in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, M Karunanidhi sat at Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters in Chennai, holding a press conference. A preliminary round of government formation talks was over, and DMK had in its kitty two cabinet berths and four ministers of state; yet the DMK president wanted one more.Sonia Gandhi’s emissaries trying to reach Karunanidhi were told to tune into Sun News that was telecasting the press conference live. Karunanidhi replied to reporters’ questions with his characteristic puns that meant many things to many people, yet gave away nothing. Before the interaction was over, DMK got a seventh minister.Fifteen years later, Karunanidhi’s son M K Stalin has led the DMK to virtually win all the 20 seats it contested (and 18 for his allies), but is left with no say in Delhi. Similar is the predicament of two other regional party leaders — K Chandrasekhar Rao whose TRS won nine of the 17 seats in Telangana and Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy whose YSR Congress was set to garner about 22 out of 25 seats in Andhra Pradesh. The return of saffron in the north has left the southern satraps victorious yet powerless.BJP winning 25 seats in Karnataka and four in Telangana would mean a few number of ministers from the south, but being from the ruling party, those MPs would lack the bargaining power.Without a common plan, the three musketeers of the south had charted diverse paths to capture their fiefs. Believing in forecasts that showed a clean sweep for him in Telangana, KCR took time to float the idea of a federal front. Soon after polling in his state, KCR made a pilgrimage across the south, during which he met Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan and DMK president Stalin, and spoke to Karnataka chief minister H D Kumaraswamy.Stalin shook hands with KCR, but refused to let go of the Congress . In fact, Stalin was the first to propose, as early as in December last year, Rahul Gandhi as the united opposition’s PM candidate. There was more than just loyalty: Stalin needs the eight Congress legislators if he decides to pull rug from under Tamil Nadu CM K Palaniswami’s feet (AIADMK for now survives after winning nine of the 22 assembly seats that had bypolls).Jagan has been the most silent of the trio — and the most confident that he decided to move his residence-office from Hyderabad to Tadepalli in the Amaravati capital region two days before the results. Like Stalin, Jagan too wants to be at the helm of his state first.In the past decade, the southern states have had a forgettable presence in the Union government —in terms of heft in the first half, and in terms of numbers and influence in the second half. Under UPA-II, the three states had 26 to 28 ministers (including MoS).Under Narendra Modi, the representation has been abysmal: just one Lok Sabha MP from the south — Sadananda Gowda from Karnataka — holds a cabinet rank ( Nirmala Sitharaman was elected to the Rajya Sabha); the three junior ministers (Pon Radhakrishnan from Tamil Nadu, Anant Kumar Hegde from Karnataka and Alphons Kannanthanam from Kerala) had little say inside or outside the government.As the 17th Lok Sabha gets to business, the new south bloc at the Centre would feel so near yet so far from power.