Sivagangai: Sivagangai, the political cradle of prominent Congress leader P. Chidambaram, is unlikely to return even one Congress representative in the May 16 Assembly election from any of the four Assembly constituencies falling within it. Once a strong Congress bastion, the Sivagangai Lok Sabha constituency had chosen a son of the soil, Palaniappan Chidambaram, to represent it seven times between 1984 and 2009. But today, the people of the constituency are disillusioned, not just with Chidambaram but also the Congress, mainly because they feel that their celebrity representative did nothing much for them.
Chidambaram’s election from the constituency enabled him to hold powerful positions like minister of state for personnel, public grievance and pensions; minister of state for internal security; minister of state (independent charge) for commerce; minister of finance and minister of home affairs, besides working closely with former Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh.
“Yet the constituency did not benefit”, says Durai Karunanidhi, 58, former lieutenant of Chidambaram, who points out that Karti Chidambaram lost his deposit in the 2014 election and also how the Congress vote bank has declined over the years. In 1980, RV Swaminathan won by a margin of three lakh votes and in 2009 Chidambaram’s lead was a mere 3,354 votes, he said.
Traditionally, people of Sivagangai and adjacent Ramanathapuram districts had emotional attachment to the Congress as it had given rise to generations of freedom fighters since the days of Queen Velu Nachiyar and the Maruthu Pandiyar brothers. “Congress had nearly 20 lakh votes from five assembly constituencies - Sivagangai, Karaikudi, Manamadurai, Ilayangudi and Tiruppattur - till the late ’80s, but now you will find just a few thousand cadres in each constituency,” said 92-year-old Sethuraman, a freedom fighter from Sivagangai.
Chidambaram used the Congress supporters only for his personal growth, but did nothing for the welfare of party functionaries, charged the freedom fighter, who had once petitioned the powerful Union minister for a freedom fighter’s pension in vain. Karunanidhi, who stood by Chidambaram even when he launched his own Congress Jananayaka Peravai in 2001, said that when an impoverished Congress orator Jayachandran from Tirupattur approached Chidambaram for financial assistance of Rs 2,500 from the district Congress trust to pay the school fees of his daughter, he bluntly refused.
“Why should we give you money from the trust,” was his reply, recalls Karunanidhi, who was then president of the trust, but couldn’t overrule the senior leader’s decision. Jayachandran, who had campaigned enthusiastically for Chidambaram, was heartbroken, Karunanidhi said. In another incident, he sanctioned a paltry amount of Rs 2,500 to Sebastian from Panipuzanvayal village, whose house was gutted in a fire accident a day before his son’s marriage, much to chagrin of the Dalit party worker who had cycled to the interior villages canvassing votes for Chidambaram.
To party functionaries approaching Chidambaram for college admission or jobs for children, he had a stock reply: “Your children should have merit; should score good marks in the entrance exam; and should do well in the interview. If they perform well, they will get admission on their own,” said M Ramanathan from Sivagangai district. “Chidambaram was well aware that most of the children of party cadres were first generation graduates lacking command over English. Yet he would not help us,” he added.
As a young man, Chidambaram caught the attention of Congress cadres when he first visited the district along with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the ’70s, translating her speeches into Tamil. They saw in his clearly modulated Tamil a counter to the DMK leader’s pure Tamil (Senthamil) orations. Then, he endeared himself to the local Congress unit so much - by visiting Sivagangai on party work and to address political and literary meetings regularly – that when the party high command did not give him the ticket to contest from Sivagangai Lok Sabha constituency, the district committee put pressure on the party to nominate him for the seat, though it didn’t finally happen. It is a different matter that he had lost the Karaikudi Assembly seat in the 1977 elections by a margin of 240 votes.
The loyalty of the local Congress members was so blind that they walked away with him when he went to the Tamil Maanila Congress in 1996, even though Chidambaram has been showing his real face since 1984. Notwithstanding the verse from Tirukkural that he quotes, ‘King’ Chidambaram never takes criticism from Congress functionaries. If one dares to question his political action, it would be the end of his political career,” said Ayothi, a former Congress functionary.
Many prominent senior Congress leaders like late O. Subramanian from Sivagangai, ARP Murugesan from Manamadurai, former MP Udayappan from Paganeri, K.K. Balasubramanian from Thirupuvanam, K.K. Kasilingam from Ilayangudi and Mangudi from Sankarapuram were sidelined because they questioned Chidambaram’s nepotism, Karunanidhi said.
After he emerged powerful, Chidambaram used his political clout to deny a seat to Subramanian’s son Udayappan for Sivaganga Assembly constituency 1989 only because Subramanian asked the party to allocate Sivaganga Lok Sabha seat to him in the 1984 election,” claimed Ayothi. Sharing a personal experience, Ayothi said that when his family member Buvaneshwari contested for the Thirupuvanam town panchayat chairman in 2011, Chidambaram refused to give party symbol for her.
“When I approached the party office at Sivagangai to get the letter for allocation of party symbol, Chidambaram’s son Karti asked me to shift my loyalty to their side to allocate the symbol, but I refused,” said Ayothi, a Vasan loyalist. In an attempt to safeguard his power in the district, he never allowed Congress functionaries to organise meetings when other senior leaders visited the districts, he said. Then his move to make his son as successor that led to party workers losing their faith in him completely, said Ramanthan.
The people also lost faith in Chidambaram because he didn’t bring any industrial developments in this backward district. He might have opened many banks, but how will that help poor to meet their livelihood,” asked Karunanidhi.
“The world famous economist who brought various developments to the nation, failed to develop either the party or the economy of the district. He used his brain only for his personal growth,” charged Karunanidhi. Most of the senior Congress leaders including Karunanidhi and Ayothi have joined the TMC recently, weakening the hold of the Congress in what was once its bastion.
