Admits that in retrospect, People’s Welfare Front should have stuck to collective leadership

: MDMK general secretary and People’s Welfare Front (PWF) convener Vaiko on Wednesday said it was wrong to have gone back on the PWF’s original decision of not projecting anyone as its Chief Minister candidate in the last general elections and later naming DMDK leader Vijayakant for the post.

Explaining what prompted the four-party PWF to do a volte face when it had put forth a model of “collective leadership”, he said it was decided to project Mr. Vijayakant as Chief Minister in the May 2016 Assembly elections because he rejected all offers of seat-sharing from the DMK and came forward to be part of the alternative front.

The PWF-DMDK-TMC alliance came a cropper in the elections and Mr. Vijayakant and TMC leader G.K. Vasan have since snapped their ties with the four-party group.

“You must take into consideration the circumstances under which we named him as the Chief Minister candidate. We had to show respect and gratefulness to him for agreeing to be part of the PWF. Even though the DMK was ready to allot adequate seats and made other offers to face the elections, he refused to join the alliance. As a token of gratitude, we projected him as Chief Ministerial candidate of the PWF,” Mr. Vaiko told The Hindu reflecting on certain past political actions.

The MDMK leader contended that contrary to popular perception that he was very particular about forming an alliance with the AIADMK in the 2006 Assembly poll, it was his party colleagues who imposed the decision on him. “My former colleagues including L. Ganesan, Ginjee Ramchandran and M. Kannappan were against an alliance with the DMK and favoured the AIADMK. I respected the majority opinion in the party. But it was these leaders who subsequently joined the DMK,” he claimed.

Mr. Vaiko said he had toiled for the DMK for 29 years and the reward he got in return was expulsion from the party. “The party accused me of conspiring to eliminate the leader (M. Karunanidhi) with the help of the LTTE. My political career would have doomed on the day of my expulsion. But my supporters stood by me and we launched the MDMK. Even today, the DMK has a single point agenda of destroying the MDMK,” he alleged.

According to him, he was not pro-AIADMK and said he did not knock at the door of its general secretary Ms. Jayalalithaa in the 2011 Assembly elections. “Instead, we boycotted the elections. The very next day, Ms. Jayalalithaa wrote a moving letter to me saying as a sister she would respect my political decision. When I was on a pada yatra demanding prohibition and suffering blisters, she took the pain to meet me on the road. But I did not take advantage of her friendship and curry political favour,” he argued.