The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been repeatedly criticised for distorting historical events and narratives around politicians, popular leaders, and most recently, the ‘sengol’, a historical sceptre from Tamil Nadu. In the same vein, during a recent visit to Tamil Nadu on June 12, Union Home Minister Amit Shah reportedly said that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) had hindered two Tamils from becoming Prime Ministers in the past, in a closed-door meeting with BJP functionaries in Chennai. Reports said that Amit Shah also indicated that there was a chance for a Tamil person to be named BJP’s PM candidate in the near future, triggering a wave of strong political responses in Tamil Nadu.
Reacting to the comment, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin took a jibe at the BJP and said that he welcomed the party’s plans to name a Tamil person as its prime ministerial candidate, while wondering if Amit Shah was angry with current PM Narendra Modi to have said so. He even suggested potential PM candidates for the BJP to nominate — Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan and Union Minister of State L Murugan. Both Tamilisai and Murugan have headed the BJP’s Tamil Nadu unit in the past and are among the most prominent Tamil leaders in the party.
Setting aside the fanciful speculation over who could be the Tamil PM candidate from BJP in the future, TNM looked into the history of Tamil Nadu politicians who could’ve been Prime Minister, to figure out the two ‘sidelined’ leaders Amit Shah purportedly alluded to in his meeting. Political historians from Tamil Nadu say that the remark was probably about Congress stalwart and former Tamil Nadu CM K Kamaraj, and erstwhile Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) leader and parliamentarian GK Moopanar.
K Kamaraj, who is often called the architect of Tamil Nadu, is a former president of the Indian National Congress. He is remembered as a ‘kingmaker’ for his key role in elevating Lal Bahadur Shastri (following his predecessor Jawaharlal Nehru’s demise) and Indira Gandhi (following Shastri’s death soon after) to the position of the Prime Minister of the country in the 1960s. But there is no recorded documentation to support the speculation that he aspired to become the Prime Minister himself. On many occasions, Kamaraj’s actions indicated that he was not interested in holding power positions, and that he only took up leadership roles as a staunch supporter of Congress.
Kamaraj was a three-time Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu from 1954 to 1963, when he stepped down from the position to lead the Congress party at the national level and stabilise it, in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian war in 1962 and the prevailing anti-incumbency sentiment. Even after stepping down as Congress president, in the 1967 Assembly elections he chose to contest from the Virudhunagar Assembly constituency, where he was defeated by P Sreenivasan of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).
While he later won the 1969 Lok Sabha bye-election from Nagercoil and became an MP, Indira Gandhi had cultivated all the support she needed to retain her power and position as PM. The situation remained the same even when the party split in 1969, and her Indian National Congress (Requisitionists) [INC(R)] contested in 1971 against the original Congress party, the Indian National Congress (Organisation) [INC(O)] led by Kamaraj.
In the 1971 general elections, Kamaraj won from the Nagercoil Lok Sabha constituency once again, and continued to work as MP of Nagercoil till his demise in 1975. His political career does not align with the narrative put forth by Amit Shah’s reported remarks that DMK somehow conspiring against the prime ministerial candidacy of Kamaraj, who was held in the highest regard among his party people at the time.
Kamaraj first became Chief Minister of the erstwhile Madras state in 1954. He is credited with providing one of the best administrations to the people of the state till 1963. This is the time period when the electoral graph of DMK saw a sharp growth, from securing only 15 seats in the 1957 Assembly elections to 50 seats in the next election in 1962. In Tamil Nadu, it was essential for Kamaraj to stabilise the Congress, as he was witnessing the tremendous influence of DMK under the leadership of CN Annadurai. DMK reached out to the people of Tamil Nadu with the idea of strong state autonomy, which yielded good results in the following years.
To strengthen the Congress party in the aftermath of the Indo-China War, Kamaraj in 1963 suggested to the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that senior Congress leaders should leave ministerial posts to take up organisational work to strengthen the party at the grassroots level. This was referred to as the K plan or Kamaraj plan. The Congress Working Committee approved the plan and implemented it within two months. During the discussion with Nehru, Kamaraj said that while continuous success in elections was alright, prolonged office incumbency distanced the leaders from the masses, according to The Hindu.
On October 2, 1963, on the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, Kamaraj resigned as Chief Minister of Madras state. Along with him, several other leaders also stepped down, including a few other Chief Ministers such as Biju Patnaik (Odisha), Chandra Bhanu Gupta (UP), Binodanand Jha (Bihar), and Bhagwantrao Mandloi (Madhya Pradesh). In the Union cabinet, six Union Ministers — Lal Bahadur Shastri (Home), Morarji Desai (Finance), KL Shrimali (Education), Bezawada Gopala Reddy (Information and Broadcasting), SK Patil (Food and Agriculture), and Jagjivan Ram (Transport and Communications) also resigned from their posts. However, Lal Bahadur Shastri was brought back to the Union cabinet without a Minister’s portfolio reportedly on Kamaraj’s insistence, and worked virtually as the Deputy Prime Minister. This later made the task easy for the then-party president Kamaraj to elevate Shastri as the second prime minister of the country in 1964, following Nehru’s demise.
Two years later, again, amid chaos within Congress after the death of Shastri, Kamaraj campaigned for Indira Gandhi to become the PM in 1966. Meanwhile, his own K Plan eventually led to his defeat in the 1967 Assembly election from Virudhunagar, and his role in the party at the national level also took a back seat. In the following months, he also had to resign from his post as Congress president. Although Indira Gandhi wanted him to be a part of the Union cabinet after his win in the 1969 Nagercoil Lok Sabha bye-election, Kamaraj refused the offer. Later, the rift between the two leaders widened and eventually, the Congress was split in 1969.
INC(O) was under the control of Kamaraj with a handful of his old associates in the party including future PM Morarji Desai, and leaders like SK Patil and S Nijalingappa. INC(R) was created and led by Indira Gandhi. These parties contested against each other in the 1971 general elections, and INC(O) was able to win only 16 Lok Shaba seats while INC(R) won 352 seats. The next general election was conducted in 1977 due to the emergency, only after Kamaraj’s demise.
In the case of another former Congress leader Moopanar who later founded the Tamil Maanila Congress in 1996, his name cropped up twice as a potential PM candidate in 1996 and 1997, when regional parties played a major role in the selection of Prime Minister to the 11th Lok Sabha. Although the 1996 general elections resulted in a hung Parliament, the BJP emerged as the largest single party and ended up forming the government with Atal Bihari Vajpayee sworn in as PM, but it lasted only for about two weeks.
Subsequently, an alliance named the United Front — whose members included Janata Dal, Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (Marxist), DMK, Samajwadi Party, Telugu Desam Party, as well as Moopanar’s Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC), with external support from Congress — was able to form the government.
Moopanar’s fledgling TMC had won all the 20 seats it contested, but only as an ally of the DMK. Moopanar himself expressed his surprise in private conversations. It was a massive vote against the ways of the previous Jayalalithaa government, he knew, and didn't make a song and dance about his triumph, a senior journalist covering Tamil Nadu politics at the time said.
He also had a realistic understanding of his party vis-a-vis DMK and hence he is supposed to have turned down the offer to make him the leader of the United Front, and thus passed up the opportunity to Deve Gowda.
But when Deve Gowda had to step down as PM in 1997 following problems with Congress, the race was wide open, and Moopanar’s name came up yet again. As an ex-Congressman and also a Rajiv Gandhi loyalist, he would have been acceptable to the big party backing the United Front government from the outside, it was then widely believed.
At one point it looked like he carried all-round support and was seen as a very savvy manipulator who could steer the United Front ship through treacherous waters. At the state conference of the TMC held at the time, there was widespread jubilation, and Moopanar did seem to indicate that he was inclined to accept the job if it came his way.
Unfortunately though, Karunanidhi, the then DMK chief, did not seem to relish the prospect of his junior partner becoming the PM. He never committed himself to whom he would support even at the time of his departure for New Delhi to decide on the issue. He didn’t go on record about his preferences, although later on he would insist that he had been for Moopanar all along, and that only other United Front leaders were against his ‘‘valued’ colleague.
It was CPI(M) leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet who was vehemently against Moopanar’s accession as he was a Congressman anyway and would only be too willing to implement their agenda, according to reports at the time. Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav too had his eyes on the job and hence threw his cap into the ring. In these circumstances, as a compromise, IK Gujral was eventually chosen as the PM candidate.