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Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)
So, it's goodbye, Mr. Vasan - but not "au revoir", for there is now no coming back, Mr. Vasan. Once bitten, twice shy.
When GK Moopanar, Vasan's father, quit the Congress to set up his regional outfit, the Tamil Maanila (which means "provincial" - and has nothing to do with the capital of the Philippines) Congress (TMC), it was a pressure tactic more than a definitive break, part of the splintering of the Indian National Congress under a non-Nehru-Gandhi leader in 1996.
Moopanar and the TMC learned their lesson three years later, in 1999, when they lost every single seat they contested, including that of P. Chidambaram. The defeat quite literally took the life of the war-horse. With their tail between their legs, the TMC under his son, Vasan (but minus Chidambaram, who came back only after he was made Finance Minister), returned to the Congress fold in 2002. Or so we thought.
It would now appear that while we thought the TMC was merging with the Congress, Vasan thought the Congress was merging with his party. For throughout these troubled 11 years of a failed marriage, the Vasan faction never gave up its separate identity. Notwithstanding 1999, they held that they were the "real" Congress and the Sonia Congress merely an appendage to them, at least in Tamil Nadu.
At the time, I protested that a pretend merger would only aggravate issues, not resolve them, because if the power-sharing formula did not extend to the very top, the Congress would be caught in a never-ending factional fight over posts and positions in the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee.
That is what has happened. For a while, when the Congress was in power at the centre, the TMC could be bought off by offering them positions in Delhi, in the party or government, to compensate them for what they considered their surrender at Satyamurthi Bhawan, Chennai. Now that the glue of governmental power is no longer there, Vasan and his team first tried to monopolize the TNCC, and on being resisted, have made off to seek their fortune on their own.
They won't succeed, for the Dravidians have occupied the provincial space. I use the word in plural because although the Dravidians are now divided in several different parties (but united in corruption) - Jayalalithaa's AIADMK, Karunanidhi's DMK, Ramadoss' PMK, Capt. Vijayakanth's DMDK and Vaiko's Marumalarchi (Renaissance) DMK , besides several other groupuscules - the one common theme they have is that they are emphatically provincial, not national, in composition and ambition.
They all identify themselves as definitely NOT Congress. To them, Vasan's little bark (commanding about 3 per cent of the total Tamil vote) will always be Congress minus. The craft on which Vasan has set sail will certainly sink and if he succeeds in finding a Dravidian partner, the TMC will definitely be subordinate to that party.
True, the mother Congress is now the rump Congress in Tamil Nadu, but it is the Congress - a national party with a destiny beyond, but inclusive of, Tamil Nadu. The mistake we must not commit in future is giving the Vasan faction another chance.
Let them go their way. We will go ours, and, freed of the most demanding faction, perhaps we will even find our way to resurrection.
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