Kanimozhi: Scribe, poet, social activist now accused

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From being a simple woman who insisted on working as a sub-editor in a newspaper to earn her pocket money rather than depend entirely on her chief minister father, Kanimozhi, 41, has come a long way.

Condemned now in the CBI chargesheet for alleged involvement in the multi-billion rupee scam, the DMK’s Rajya Sabha member has very few friends in her own party and almost none in the family, barring her parents and only son.

To start with, Kanimozhi was an unwilling entrant to DMK politics, convinced that her older brothers M. K. Stalin and M. K. Alagiri, born to Mr Karunanidhi’s second wife Dayalu Ammal (Kani’s mother Rajathi Ammal is the third wife) would not want to see her as a possible rival. But circumstances — and pressure from mother Rajathi, it is said — propelled Kanimozhi to take the plunge.

Papa Karunanidhi, who doted on her for her proficiency in literature and suave ways, made her the Rajya Sabha member. That’s how the poetess turned a politician, and perhaps that’s where the downslide began for the charming woman who loved debating literary issues and campaigning for the downtrodden.

Her close friends in the media during those ‘simple’ days in her dad’s previous chief ministerial tenure, 1996-2001, would remember how she would arrive in a hired auto-rickshaw for an evening movie and later get dropped at home after a bite in a nondescript restaurant. “She was such a warm person, always available if you needed a shoulder to sob about your rotten guy,” recalled an ‘old’ friend, adding, “But now, she is in a different world, a galaxy of new stars.”

Kanimozhi’s had organized several job fairs on behalf of her party to help the rural educated, pressured her father to give legal status to the transgenders and brought rural artists to the cities to perform under the banner Chennai Sangamam, of course with liberal help from the DMK government.

But spectrum undid all the good things that the talented woman had done for the people and her party, even as reports flung around — not just in the media but also among commoners — that she had acquired huge wealth in recent years.

Will Kani still wade out of this quicksand and reclaim her position in the party and gain peace at home? It all depends on how long her loving father is around calling the shots.