In seat facing Lanka, highlight is OPS’s fight, not Sethusamudram or Katchatheevu

Last year, a buzz began that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government has been making extensive outreach to Tamils, would contest from Ramanathapuram.

Once the Lok Sabha poll battle began, the BJP rolled out yet another dice – accusing the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government of giving away Katchatheevu island located 33 km off the Ramanathapuram coast, and the ruling DMK (which was also in power in the state then) of being complicit in the decision.

O Pannerselvam addressing a poll rally at Devipattinam, a coastal village near Ramanathapuram, on Tuesday evening. (Photo: Arun Janardhanan)

In the Ramanathapuram constituency itself, which directly faces Sri Lanka, none of the above is an issue, despite it being a fishermen constituency. The most distinctive feature of the fight here is the candidature of O Panneerselvam or OPS, the man who has become the face of the transformation the AIADMK has undergone since J Jayalalithaa’s demise in December 2016, much of it seen as wrought by the BJP.

Having lost successive battles for control of the AIADMK – at party fora, and in courts – OPS has been forced to take shelter in the BJP-led alliance, after the AIADMK parted ways with it. The ex-CM is now contesting as an Independent, with BJP support.

Now making perhaps his last stand, in a seat that was won in 2019 by DMK ally IUML, and where the party remains strong, the 73-year-old is campaigning late into the evening, trying to cover as much ground as he can.

Close to midnight on Tuesday, driving down in a convoy from a campaign meeting at a small village near Ramanathapuram town, OPS remains unflagging – at least in his desire to wrest back the AIADMK.

No, there is no regret about rebelling against the official faction led by E Palaniswami. Or any desire to “time travel” and change the sequence of events leading to his expulsion from the party, in which he had spent more than 45 years.

“Why should I want to time travel?” OPS retorts. “All my steps were to retrieve the party from certain people, and hand it to ordinary AIADMK cadres.”

It is hard not to take OPS’s words with a pinch of salt. “The certain people” he talks about are Jayalalithaa’s confidante V K Sasikala and her nephew T T V Dhinakaran – now also expelled from the AIADMK and part of the BJP camp, like OPS.

OPS, in fact, has agreed to let Dhinakaran contest the Theni seat, which had been won by OPS’s son O P Ravindranath Kumar in 2019 (the only constituency not won by the DMK-led alliance then). Ravindranath is now actively working for Dhinakaran in Theni, OPS’s native town.

On the other hand, Ramanathapuram, from where OPS is contesting, is relatively new ground for him. He has taken on the risk despite already being a sitting MLA. Aides say the BJP kept him waiting till the last minute on assurance of support, as it probed the scope of a patch-up with the AIADMK.

OPS’s biggest hope is that the Thevars, the OBC community to which he belongs and which is dominant here, will stand by him. The DMK alliance has refielded the IUML’s 2019 winner, K Navas Kani. The AIADMK’s P Jeyaperumal and Naam Tamilar Katchi’s Chandraprabha are also in the fray.

Denying reports that he was forced to give up Theni, OPS says it was he who picked Ramanathapuram “because it is the place where Lord Ram built the bridge across the ocean to rescue Sita Devi”.

The fact that the BJP has been making slow gains here would have been another factor. If in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, it got 16.5% of the votes, by 2014, it was up to 17.20%. In 2019, the BJP-AIADMK together got 32.31% votes.

While the winner in 2014 was the AIADMK, with 40.81% of the votes, and the runner-up the DMK with 28.81% votes, in 2019, DMK ally IUML got 44.29% of the votes and the AIADMK-BJP alliance was second placed.

The IUML 2019 win was not a fluke given Ramanathapuram’s significant minority population, another reason that the BJP has treaded here on the back of allies. This time, if the DMK has the IUML with it, the AIADMK has the PFI political wing SDPI (Social Democratic Party of India) as an ally.

OPS says he is confident that Muslims too would vote for him seeing the Modi government’s record. “No minority community has been targeted under Modi. Everyone is treated equally,” he says.

While OPS admits he hasn’t had any detailed interaction with Modi since the poll dates were announced, he claims “respect” for him since 2016. “Everyone respects him, and it is certain that he will be elected for a third time.”

Returning to Palaniswami and why he thinks the AIADMK is no longer the party it was, OPS says: “When MGR started the party, it had bylaws, and the most important was the direct election of the party general secretary by the crores of cadres. That has been sabotaged by Palaniswami.”

He denies that his description of Palaniswami as “dictatorial, undemocratic” has long held true for the AIADMK. “Amma (Jayalalithaa) was very democratic. Everything she did was in consultation with people like me, officers and experts… not like Palaniswami,” OPS says.

However, not all believe OPS’s portrayal of himself as a victim of the internecine AIADMK fight. Many see him as the man who betrayed the AIADMK soon after Jayalalithaa’s demise, particularly as he was officiating as the CM at the time on her behalf (as he had done earlier as well).

Within the BJP alliance too, some are not happy with the ticket to him and, on condition of anonymity, admit to working to defeat him. “OPS was the man who triggered a revolt within the AIADMK without leaving the party. The people don’t accept this, even if they forgive leaders jumping ship,” says a Madurai-based leader of the Tamil Maanila Congress, which is also a part of the NDA.

This is why other AIADMK rebels such as Dhinakaran (Theni) and Nainar Nagendran (Tirunelveli) are viewed more favourably. Many point out that while Nagendran quit the AIADMK back in 2017, Dhinakaran had fought a long and hard battle against the BJP.

It has been difficult for OPS to shake off the impression that he acted as an RSS stooge in fomenting rebellion within the AIADMK. In 2019, senior RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy claimed at the golden jubilee function of the Tughlak magazine that it was on his advice that OPS had rebelled against Sasikala, who saw herself as the natural successor to Jayalalithaa.