Alliance of Convenience

If it was only the allocation of three seats in next month’s Tamil Nadu assembly elections that came between the Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) last week, one wonders what all the song and dance was about.

There are reasons though for the DMK playing the politics of brinkmanship; one only has to look closely at the events of the past few weeks to understand the context of the party’s actions. The arrest of former union minister A Raja of the DMK for his role in the 2G telecommunications scam and speculation about the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) soon taking action against members of the DMK’s first family over complaints of bribery have strained the seven-year-long DMK-Congress tie-up. Did the final seat-sharing “agreement” feature a quid pro quo of a reprieve for the DMK protagonists, much like the UPA government has at different points of time gone slow on CBI investigations into similar allegations of corruption against Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party and Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party?