Why the Sengottaiyan problem can harm EPS more than anything
When J Jayalalithaa was undergoing treatment at Apollo Hospitals on Greams Road, Chennai for 75 days in 2016, the hospital kept all the CCTV cameras in the building turned off. Late on December 5, when the hospital was preparing the bulletin announcing her death, V K Sasikala and a few senior leaders of AIADMK went into a huddle on the second floor of the hospital to name a stand-in chief minister. And one of the names, along with O Panneerselvam’s, was K A Sengottaiyan. OPS got it – and lost it soon – and Sengottaiyan took it gracefully. Had he got the job then, AIADMK may have looked different than it looks today.
On Saturday, AIADMK general secretary Edappadi Palaniswami removed Sengottaiyan, 77, from the party posts he held (organization secretary and Erode suburban west district secretary). The reason: He held a press meet on Friday and set a 10-day deadline for EPS to take back those who were expelled from the party. When reporters asked Sengottaiyan who were the people he wanted to be re-inducted, he refused to name Sasikala, T T V Dhinakaran or O Panneerselvam; instead lobbed the ball to EPS’s court, saying it was for the general secretary to decide.
And EPS knows Sengottaiyan’s priority list – Sasikala, TTV, OPS, in that order. Sengottaiyan may be raising the flag of unity, but behind his audacity is one of his basic qualities – loyalty. Ever since he became an MLA from Sathyamangalam in 1977 (and he has been nine times that, the next eight from his home constituency of Gobichettipalayam), Sengottaiyan had remained loyal to MGR – and later Jayalalithaa and Sasikala.
Hailing from the same community (gounder) and region (west) as EPS, Sengottaiyan has maintained a relatively low profile even while in Jayalalithaa’s good books. Before every election campaign Jayalalithaa did, Sengottaiyan would chart her route, stops and crowd management. He would do a recce looking for potential political pitfalls as much as physical potholes on the road. Sengottaiyan was almost a karma yogi when Jayalalithaa made him a minister in 1991 and dropped him from the candidates’ list in 2001. He returned to the Jayalalithaa cabinet ten years later. When he was again shown the door in 2012, he put his head down and worked as usual.
And that was something Sasikala couldn’t have missed. Not for nothing that Sasikala named him one of the organizing secretaries of the party when its presidium chairman E Madhusudanan moved to the OPS camp after the ‘caretaker CM’ sat on the famously disastrous ‘dharmayudham’ in February 2017 (taking over as chief minister after Sasikala went to prison, EPS had no option but to include Sengottaiyan in his cabinet). And now, it’s payback time for Sengottaiyan.
His support base is nothing to write home about, but Sengottaiyan – if he remains a renegade within or brings together those out in the cold to stitch up an alliance with Vijay’s TVK – can do enough harm to the electoral prospects of EPS whose intransigence has cost NDA some of its partners like TTV and OPS. Indeed, EPS stonewalls any move to bring back Sasikala & Co, for he knows better than anyone else that he could be reintroducing irritants who he had got rid of to take control of the party. It is to EPS’s credit that, when many wrote off AIADMK after Jayalalithaa’s death and the brawls that ensued, he took the helm and led the party to a respectable performance in 2021, though he couldn’t stop DMK from marching to Fort St George.
But 2026 is different. Being out of power for 10 years will be the ultimate test of survival for EPS and his party. This time, if the AIADMK-BJP alliance is to give a tough fight to the DMK-led front, EPS will have to learn to be as accommodative as assertive. BJP must be telling him that.
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Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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