Welling up over DMK Leader Raja’s Remarks, EPS Must Remember How Amma Dealt with Humiliation

If swords were the weapons of choice in the battles of yore, in the electoral battlefields now, it is the sharp tongue of the politicians. In the final phase of campaigning for the April 6 polls in Tamil Nadu, former Union Minister A. Raja drew blood, nay tears, from none other than Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami and got grounded by the Election Commission. Campaigning for the DMK candidate Dr N. Ezhilan in Chennai’s Thousand Lights constituency, Raja said Edappadi was no match for his party leader, M. K. Stalin, who rose to his present position only after toiling for the party from a very young age, starting with incarceration under the MISA during Emergency, building up the youth wing, becoming an MLA, taking on responsibilities as a Chennai mayor and later deputy chief minister of Tamil Nadu. This was a reference to the post-Jayalalithaa crisis in the AIADMK that prompted her all-powerful associate Sasikala to name hitherto little-known Edappadi Palaniswami as the replacement for ‘rebel’ O. Panneerselvam to the chief minister’s post. Edappadi Palaniswami or EPS in a subsequent campaign outing in the city ‘almost broke down’, telling his women audience that if the chief minister could have his mother, a poor farmer who died recently after leading a respectable life, humiliated, one could imagine the plight of women if the DMK came to power.