Who Is Next On ED's Hit-List In Tamil Nadu?

Already, there is a feeling even within the BJP's AIADMK ally that the BJP is overdoing things on the ED/I-T front, as corruption is not an election issue in the state -- as long as the people are otherwise not excessively unhappy with the governing party, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin may have made light of the second Enforcement Directorate raid on his cabinet colleagues in as many months, but it only covers half the truth.

Clearly, the party hierarchy is rattled as to who will be the next target, another minister, lawmaker or others connected to the leadership.

The reasons are not far to seek. For a second minister in as many months, the ED raided and questioned K Ponmudy, in charge of higher education, and parliamentarian-son Gautham Sigamani, Lok Sabha member from Kallakurichi.

This was after the previous month's quota had netted Electricity and Excise Minister Senthil Balaji, whose arrest, subsequent heart surgery and attendant court cases kept the local media especially busy for a month.

The Tamil Nadu police have since moved Balaji from a private hospital in Chennai, where they had held him prisoner, to the central prison in suburban Puzhal. He continues to be a 'minister without portfolio' after Governor R N Ravi retracted his sack order only hours later after Union Home Minister Amit Shah advised him to consult the attorney general on the Constitutional provisions, precedents and propriety of it all.

Ravi was in Delhi for a few days subsequently, where he met with Amit Shah. It is not known if he had consulted the attorney general's office. For now, he has been maintaining a relatively low profile, as if to let the ED hog all the limelight.

Like Balaji, Ponmudy's case also pertains to an era before the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the Centre. Unlike Balaji, who is a recent defector from the rival All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Ponmudy is a thoroughbred DMK veteran. Hence, he may not have the kind of excuses to offer or extortions to make, 'under pressure', that the loot went up the ladder.

Not that he is expected to admit any guilt in the case against him. Nor is any of the other DMK leaders, who may be waiting their turn for a knock on their door, whether from the ED or sister-organisations like the income-tax department and CBI, or all of them, one after the other.

On paper, it looks as if the BJP-ruled Centre may have timed the two raids wrong -- that is if the political leadership had any say in the matter. The Balaji raid happened soon after Stalin returned from the maiden anti-BJP Opposition conclave in Patna.

The one against Ponmudy came the day the chief minister was flying to neighbouring Bengaluru, to attend the even more important second session of the Opposition conclave, where they were also expected to christen their baby.

Stalin implied that the Centre wanted to steal the Bangalore show, and added that the ED, after Ravi, was only campaigning for the DMK alliance in the long run-up to next year's Lok Sabha polls.

It was not wholly untrue. As after the Patna conclave, at the Bengaluru meet, Opposition leaders were united in raising their voice against the BJP's 'vendetta politics', centring their arguments on the twin Tamil Nadu episodes that had come about in between two meets.

But the question remains if the BJP leadership of Prime Minister Narendra D Modi and Home Minister Shah are not aware of the extra political mileage that Stalin and the DMK were getting at the Opposition conclaves?

One possibility is that they seem wanting to inject prime ministerial ambitions in the Dravidian leader, who like his late father M Karunandhi, is not as over-ambitious as their bête noire Jayalalithaa was.

If so, what end it would serve the BJP if Stalin threw his hat into the prime ministerial ring in the Opposition camp, where, anyway, no one is counting the chickens before the eggs are hatched.

But there is the other side to it. Post-Balaji raid and arrest, Modi talked about the 'Opposition dynasts', not while in Tamil Nadu but in distant Bhopal. Clearly, the BJP wants to keep the issue of 'dynastic politics' alive in the Lok Sabha poll campaign but seem to have realised the limitations in flogging the Congress, which is a dead-horse.

Hence, possibly the PM's reference to dynastic politics in regional parties, though some like Chirag Paswan, son of the late Ram Vilas Paswan, have rejoined the BJP-NDA, since.

Stalin is still possibly the senior-most active politician in the country, having entered the DMK formally a few years before the likes of Modi and Lalu Yadav. His son Udayanidhi is also the most recent to enter ministerial politics from among the regional parties in the Opposition.

So, the BJP seems to have concluded that focussing on Stalin, with the DMK's anti-god, anti-Hindu, anti-Hindi image in the North, could help the party in the Lok Sabha polls.

That the Opposition, starting with the DMK, has not done enough to propagate the religious inclination of his wife Durga Stalin, and her constant pilgrimage to Hindu temples, both inside and outside the state, including Varanasi and Tirupati, may be a dampener for them.

Inside Tamil Nadu, it may be a different cup of tea. If next year the DMK alliance does not do as well as in 2019 -- winning 38 out of 39 Lok Sabha seats from the state -- there would be other reasons.

As Stalin has indicated, it would not be for causes that the ED tends to espouse and also expose. Already, there is a feeling even within the BJP's AIADMK ally that the BJP is overdoing things on the ED/I-T front, as corruption is not an election issue in the state -- as long as the people are otherwise not excessively unhappy with the governing party.

Conversely, the raids are being seen only as a BJP electoral initiative, and that could stall the AIADMK-led NDA alliance in the state, as happened in 2019 and 2021.

Even before Jaya's death and the AIADMK joining the BJP-NDA, almost under duress (or, that is how it was seen), she had raised the slogan, 'Modi-ya, indha Lady-ya?' and swept the Lok Sabha polls in 2014, which otherwise voted the incumbent Gujarat chief minister as the nation's prime minister with a huge margin at the national-level.

Citing the past, AIADMK leaders argue that for the BJP, rather the NDA to make a mark in the Dravidian state, it will have to change tact, and become acceptable as a non-Hindutva party that desired change and a corruption-free government.

Instead, they fear that the BJP seemed hoping for the DMK state government to dust pending corruption cases against their AIADMK predecessors, if only to weaken the party's electoral chances in the aftermath of Balaji-Ponmudy kind of raids against ruling party leaders.

This, in their calculation, is aimed at the BJP claiming more in seat-sharing talks for the Lok Sabha polls than they may otherwise be entitled to.

Like their BJP counterparts, these AIADMK sources also point to Amit Shah's recent appeal for Tamil Nadu to send at least 25 Lok Sabha members, as gratitude to Modi's 'Sengol' act in the new Parliament Complex.

Of course, Shah did not name the BJP as the beneficiary in such a case, but both his party men in the state and AIADMK alliance leaders interpret it only as such.

It could be a give-away, if there is one (more), and the ED raids of the kind do not fit into a honest political fight to the finish, with which alone the state's electorate are accustomed to through the past decades.

Otherwise, Jayalalithaa, for the last one-and-a-half decades and more proved that she could twist and turn the nation's legal system at will, and die without a recorded blemish or jail-term.

When she died in December 2016 after long hospitalisation, she was a free bird and chief minister for the sixth term -- two of her innings cut short by court orders.

Justice C R Kumaraswamy in the Karnataka high court acquitted her in the 'assets case', in which trial judge Michael d'Cunha had sentenced her to four years in jail and a record Rs 100 crores in fine.

As her middle-class sympathisers wanted to believe, Jaya had 'willed herself' to die before the Supreme Court reversed the high court acquittal and upheld the trial judge's verdict in toto.

With the result, there was no A-1 against whom the court could pass orders, but A-2 to A-4, who underwent four years RI and paid a fine of Rs 10 crores each. Of course, the Supreme Court ordered the Rs 100 crore fines to be recovered from Jaya's estate.

All of it is saying a lot about the 'long arm of justice' reaching the guilty, however high they be, however powerful his or her defence is -- or, is it still so?

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.