With Kamal Haasan set to join Rahul Yatra, decks cleared for DMK to get a new ally

Since its launch in early 2018, Haasan’s party, Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM), has maintained that it will “go it alone and do it alone” in elections, claiming a “moral upper-hand” over all the parties, from the DMK to AIADMK, Congress to BJP.

But Haasan is now clearly moving away from his “independent” path towards the Congress at a time when his party seems to be unravelling as a slew of its key functionaries has deserted it.

Sources in MNM said that Rahul’s invitation made Haasan take the decision to join the Yatra. “In a letter, Rahul Gandhi asked Haasan to join him during his Yatra in Delhi. He chose to accept the invite,” sources said.

A senior Congress leader in Tamil Nadu said that Haasan could be the second well-known Tamil politician to join the Yatra. Last month, Durai Vaiko, the son of MDMK’s founder and a DMK ally Vaiko, walked with Rahul for about 30 minutes in Hyderabad.

In Tamil Nadu, where the alliances led by two major Dravidian parties, the DMK and the AIADMK, get over 80% of the votes in polls, Haasan’s MNM has made a bid to garner people’s support independently without getting aligned to any alliances so far.

A senior DMK leader told The Indian Express that Haasan’s participation in Rahul’s march would add one more party to their camp. “It means one more party has joined our alliance… In the 2021 Assembly elections, MNM got 2.52% of the votes, which was a little more than TTV Dhinakaran’s (AIADMK rebel leader)’s Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK), which got 2.3%,” the leader said.

While the DMK could not work with the MNM in the past, the possibility of their joining hands has now brightened

as the former may lose an ally, Indhiya Jananayaga Katchi founder Paarivendhar, a businessman known for his proximity with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP leadership, who had won the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Perambalur on the DMK symbol. “Almost certainly, he (Paarivendhar) is now in the BJP camp. So that gives another reason for Haasan to come on board, or he might be able to join us through the Congress,” the DMK leader said.

Even though Haasan launched the MNM as an alternative to all of Tamil Nadu’s major political parties, the challenge of its remaining afloat and staying relevant in state politics had forced him to make attempts to join the DMK alliance in the 2021 polls itself.

Although Haasan tried to warm up to the DMK through the Congress, it did not fructify as the number of seats the MNM wanted to contest in the 2021 polls was perceived by the DMK camp as “too many”. The Congress camp was also not willing to go the extra mile to get Haasan to join the DMK-led alliance, because it might have forced the former to allot seats to the MNM from its own quota.

Haasan also faced internal pressure as the MNM lost almost all of its key leaders and popular faces soon after the 2021 elections, in which its candidates lost from all the seats they contested. Many leaders quit the MNM, blaming Haasan’s “self-styled leadership” for the party’s plight.

MNM vice-president R Mahendran, M Muruganandam, former IPS officer A G Maurya, Thangavel, Umadevi, CK Kumaravel, Sekar, Suresh Iyer, former Tamil Nadu IT secretary Santhosh Babu, who took voluntary retirement from the service to join the MNM, and Padma Priya, one of the prominent young faces, were among the leaders who left Haasan’s party soon after the 2021 polls. Almost all of them quit the MNM citing “personal reasons”. Mahendran was among those who attacked Haasan for “making decisions on his own, not consulting party insiders, and letting outsiders make important decisions”.