Amit Shah seemingly encouraging AIADMK dissident Sengottaiyan after party boss Edappadi K Palaniswami had removed his one-time mentor from all party posts has not gone down well with party cadres.
They are now ready to buy Team EPS' theory that the BJP and Amit Shah are out to liquidate the AIADMK, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
Even as actor-politician Vijay's infant Tamizhaga Vettri Kazhagam is drawing good crowds for his public rallies in poll-bound Tamil Nadu, the Opposition All India Anna Dravida Munettra Kazhagam-led Bharatiya Janata Party-National Democratic Alliance seems to have given the ruling DMK rival an unexpected election issue, that too, on a platter.
By triggering fresh political speculation by meeting the newly minted AIADMK dissident and party veteran K A Sengottaiyan, BJP's national strategist Amit Shah may have sent out an unintended message to the Tamil Nadu voters.
That all is not well with the NDA in the state, and a post-poll coalition government, if it came to that, would trigger political instability that the Tamil Nadu voter has detested after their only experience with the post-Independence maiden polls of 1952.
This psyche is said to have been triggered by a 'hung assembly' in 1952, followed by two years of Congress government under Rajaji, surviving on Speaker A Sivashanmugam Pillai's 'casting vote', followed by the wholesale division of two caste based sub-regional Vanniar-strong parties that had won seats on an anti-Congress platform.
The twin Congress governments between 1952 and 1957, led respectively by Rajaji and K Kamaraj, interspersed by the Linguistic Reorganisation of States in 1956, stood on the crutches provided by the Commonweal Party and the Tamil Nadu Toilers' Party, and also the first-ever 'Mandalisation' of electoral politics in the country, under the latter, did the trick.
The present-day generation does not know any of these things, and those who know, do not care.
However, there is an ingrained sense of apprehension and anxiety to vote in a government that is perceived to be unstable, hence anti-development, even if only post-poll.
The best example was provided when the DMK under the late patriarch M Karunanidhi bagged only 96 seats in a total of 234, yet survived on the crutch provided mainly by pre-poll Congress ally that had won 34 seats.
As was to be expected, the PMK with 18 seats in the pre-poll alliance withdrew support after a time.
True, the high command of the Congress, whose partner the DMK was at the Centre, did not want to rock one boat as it feared rocking of the other too.
However, the TN voter mood not to suffer instability and blame the Congress if it became the cause also weighed in with the Sonia Gandhi leadership of the party.
Against this background, Amit Shah seemingly encouraging an AIADMK dissident, after party boss Edappadi K Palaniswami had removed one-time mentor Sengottaiyan from all party posts barring primary membership, has not gone down well with party cadres.
They are now ready to buy Team EPS' theory that the BJP and Amit Shah were out to liquidate the AIADMK, first by aligning with the party and then topping their own coalition government, if elected, to claim victory for their national leadership of the NDA.
They recall the numerous such instances where Amit Shah had done it to other regional allies in other states in the past ten years-plus.
This goes beyond the AIADMK cadres' earlier, Hindutva-based reservations against joining hands with the BJP.
They were beginning to accept the revival of the pre-2024 alliance as realpolitik if they wanted to defeat the ruling DMK, but Amit Shah's personal intervention in the AIADMK seems unacceptable to them.
This has raised more questions than answers for the pre-poll future of the alliance, where the cadres of the two parties would have to work together at the grassroots level without mutual doubts and suspicions.
That cohesion was slowly getting built up again after a break, but that is now lost, to be restarted all over again. Or, so it seems.
Among those AIADMK cadres and also second-line leaders are those who are not exactly as loyal to EPS as they are to the party.
They see a larger motive in Amit Shah, and also Tamil-knowing Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, meeting Sengottaiyan, when breakaway faction leaders, O Panneerselvam and T T V Dhinakaran were begging for an audience with Shah for months now.
Incidentally, one after the other, OPS and TTV announced their exiting the NDA, over sheer frustration and the 'disrespect' shown to their staunchly casteist Mukkulathore community, by Shah and also Prime Minister Narendra Modi not allotting them time during their Tamil Nadu visits this year.
If Shah found time for Sengottaiyan in Delhi without seeking to patch up with the exiting NDA partners, to these AIADMK cadres and second-line leaders it was only indicative of a strategy to further weaken their party, not to strengthen it by re-uniting all factions.
The theory is that if the BJP was serious about reuniting the AIADMK factions, that too under EPS, whom a majority of the party has accepted without question, then, the national ally should not have begun by antagonising existing groups in the larger NDA.
After all, there would have been no harm in Shah or any other BJP leader, including Modi, meeting existing NDA partners whom the Election Commission had not recognised as the real AIADMK.
That tag still belonged to the party under EPS' care.
Thus, Shah or even Modi meeting the other two, or even the late Jayalalithaa's confidante V K Sasikala Natarajan, would have generated less heartburn in the EPS camp than the former receiving Sengottaiyan, against whom EPS had unilaterally taken disciplinary action for setting a ten day deadline to commence the process of re-uniting the party.
Against this background, the mutual suspicions among the cadres and second-line of the BJP and the AIADMK have hit a new low.
They now suspect that both parties wanted to determine mutual supremacy before staking claim to the government.
This translates as their accepting the eventuality of the ruling DMK returning to power despite perceptions of a heavy hangover 'anti-incumbency' in the air.
After the substantive crowds that gathered in his first-phase 150-constituency, first-round campaign, EPS seems confident of going it alone next year, and ditch the BJP if it came to that.
Or, that is the perception of the BJP ally just now.
In turn, some quarters in the state BJP feel that by playing the waiting game for another election, they can decimate the AIADMK and be ready to take on the DMK-led Congress-INDIA bloc in the Lok Sabha polls of 2029.
Significantly, both sides are alive to Vijay's TVK rallies, where he is not saying anything significant other than to declare that the DMK was the party's political enemy and the BJP, the ideological enemy.
Vijay has continuously spared the AIADMK, also because the party is not in power, either in the state or the Centre. But that is only a part of the explanation.
Before Amit Shah clamped down on the AIADMK alliance overnight in April, there were talks of the latter keeping a line of communication open to the TVK.
Throughout his state-wide campaign, EPS too has spared the TVK and Vijay, thus refuelling forgotten speculation of their coming together.
There is definitely a camp in the state that feels that separately the AIADMK and the TVK won't be able to topple the DMK, but together they can.
They do not give the same chances to an AIADMK-BJP alliance, more so after the current squabbles in the AIADMK and perceptions of the BJP leadership's intervention in the 'internal affairs' of the other.
It is against this background there are revived whispers about the 'stability card' making its way into the DMK's poll campaign.
It is argued that a brand new AIADMK-TVK alliance would not suffer from its import but the continuance of the AIADMK-NDA will.
However, some BJP tacticians point out how despite worse squabbles between allies in the past, all of it had vapourised once the poll schedule was announced.
This is being countered by the BJP's experience with the late star-politician Vijayakanth-led DMDK in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, wherein the Vanniar-strong PMK, too, was a partner.
The combine polled a respectable 18.5 per cent vote-share but could win only two seats. It owed, the argument goes, to the way the BJP was seen yielding to the DMDK's 'unjust demands' that extended to the last minute.
In turn, it put off the generally 'anti-Dravidian voters' who wanted change but who settled for a stronger anti-DMK leader like the late AIADMK leader Jayalalithaa.
In the contemporary context, the argument goes, the unending squabbles that can be expected to go up to seat-sharing talks and the last constituency can tire those traditional 'anti-Dravidian voters' who are otherwise 'unattached' and who may turn to Vijay and his TVK, without anyone actually asking them for their backing.
Included in this list could be the 'Annamalai voters', who were mostly young but included others too, and wanted 'change'.
Annamalai was perceived as wanting to chalk out an independent electoral course, incidentally with the BJP as his brand.
Annamalai's removal as party chief and his replacement, with former AIADMK minister Nainar Nagendran, had upset this constituency.
Recent social media posts by a former BJP leader, Kalyan Raman, sacked by Annamalai for 'anti-party activities' alleging questionable land deals by the other, has blotted the party's copy-book even more.
Annamalai's weak explanations, in the place of anticipated outright denials, has only revived memories of his promise to produce the official receipt of a high-end wristwatch he was wearing in the pre-2024 phase, and the much-delayed and even more much-promised revelation did not convince anyone -- even his shadow, so to say.
If Kalyan Raman is able to convince his YouTube viewers more than at present, that small constituency could well either stay home on election day or vote for Vijay and the TVK, provided they go on their own -- with current prospects of playing spoilsport without winning possibly a single seat.
This is so despite Vijay consistently drawing good crowds for his rare public appearances that are well organised and choreographed, and for which the DMK government's police is giving added publicity laying down too many conditions, many of them reading silly.
For instance, at his maiden weekend electoral rally that he commenced in Tiruchi after the massive first anniversary state conference in Madurai, not far away, the local police had given a half-an-hour pre-fixed slot for Vijay's speech.
The police, starting with the intelligence wing, possibly did not visualise a situation where it took Vijay's motorcade five hours to reach the rally venue from Tiruchi airport, swimming through the mass of supporters and curious onlookers on a Saturday.
On Sunday, Vijay addressed another rally in nearby Ariyalur, but all the time reminding of his travel to Tiruchi and other major venues in a private aircraft, which idea does not always go down well with the people.
If the expression was, as Vijay himself said in the Tiruchi rally, he had made enough money from his films and would not be corrupt if elected to power, critics point to his not being an open-minded philanthropist like MGR, whose inherent and instinctive generosity alone reflected in his government's policies and programmes.
However, the five-hour Vijay motorcade has suddenly revived memories of a parallel with the late AIADMK founder M G Ramachandran's first rally in Madurai, where his train from Chennai reached nine hours behind schedule, owing to crowded and at times forced receptions given to him all along the route.
For now, however, the comparisons should stop there.
MGR did not consider himself a weekend politician, unlike Vijay, whose access to the rally crowds are blocked by uniformed bouncers from the film days -- thus reminding even TV viewers of his rallies about the distance between the man and the masses.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author of J2J: Justice Party to Jayalalithaa and After, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff