2018 saw the demise of two of the most influential leaders in Indian politics - AB Vajpayee and M Karunanidhi. Interestingly, both of them were born in 1924 and both of them died in the same year within a span of a week. They had similarities not just in their year of birth and death. They both held extraordinary command over their written and spoken languages, Hindi and Tamil, respectively as poets and orators. They both excelled as leaders par excellence even earning the praise of the opposition at the center and state level respectively. Their physical longevity and their political longevity are impossible to emulate. Both of them lived 94 glorious years and both of them dominated the national parliament & state assembly for over 5 decades. While their 94-year-old glorious travel on this planet had so many similarities, they differed sharply in one thing. It is in their approach to religion/god and their outlook to life.
Atal Behari Vajpayee was born in a Brahmin family in Gwalior. His father was a school teacher and Vajpayee ended up with a post-graduate degree in Political Science. He started his activism at a very early age and joined RSS. After doing several years of work as a pracharak, he was inducted as a founding member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). After hearing him speak at the parliament, Jawaharlal Nehru had introduced to a foreign dignitary that this young MP will one day be India’s Prime Minister. Vajpayee served as Prime Minister on three occasions, two shorter stints and one full term. He had published many books and poems which are very popular in the Hindi belt. He was greatly admired for his leadership in testing the nuclear bomb in Pokhran and also, for his various efforts to establish a dialogue with Pakistan. He had his fair share of controversies including not taking out CM Modi after the 2002 tragedy. Vajpayee was accused of doing nothing to stop the violence, and later admitted mistakes in handling the events. K. R. Narayanan, then president of India, also blamed Vajpayee’s government for failing to quell the violence. He was also blamed for playing an indirect role in stirring the passion of his followers when they went to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. On another occasion, he was blamed for his comments on Muslims. He remained a bachelor throughout his life and was greatly admired by all sections of the political spectrum as a true statesman.
Karunanidhi, on the other hand, was born in the marginalized Isai Vellalar community in Tamil Nadu. He was attracted to Periyar’s rationalist movement and dropped school to join the anti-Hindi protests. He was gifted with extraordinary writing and oratory skills. He established a magazine at the age of 15 which later on became DMK’s party mouthpiece ‘Murasoli’. He began his career as a screenwriter in Tamil film industry and earned a special place through his stories and dialogues. His most notable work was the Sivaji Ganesan starrer, Parasakthi, where he used the film medium to propagate the Dravidian ideologies. At the age of 33, he became an MLA and was one of the very few Indian politicians to have never lost an election. He ended up serving as a Chief Minister for 5 terms. He stood for social justice and even created ‘Samatuvapurams (Equality villages) when he was the CM. He married three times and has a large family. He was often blamed for being corrupt and for promoting rowdyism in Tamilnadu. He was also criticized for his silence during the Sri Lankan war where hundreds of Tamils were suffering for a long time. But his contribution to Tamil literature and the respect for his work around social justice was unquestionable. He was also appreciated for his multifaceted and hardworking nature.
While Vajpayee dominated national politics and headlines thanks largely to the reach of Hindi, Karunanidhi was a force in Tamil Nadu. Because of their respective languages not being popular in each others territory, their literary work was not known to the masses on the other side. Even Vajpayee’s leadership could never move the needle for his party in Tamilnadu. But Karunanidhi was able to influence national politics by forming coalition governments. Between the two leaders, it was clearly Karunanidhi who was more hard-working, more multifaceted and unleashed his skills in every possible way but got constrained by the limits of his own province. Even his staunchest critics will praise Karunanidhi’s hard working nature and political shrewdness. A stroke forced Vajpayee to move out of active politics since 2009 but Karunanidhi was active till 2015–16.
Vajpayee was a true follower of the Bhagavad Gita and the Hindu philosophy. He led his life on the lines laid out by Hindu philosophy and spent most of his life working to promote the Hindutva narrative of the RSS. Karunanidhi, on the other hand, grew up with the rationalist movement and had been a strong critic of religion and Gods. While Vajpayee focused on successfully spreading his Hindutva ideology across India, Karunanidhi successfully spread the rationalist movement in Tamil Nadu under the leadership of Periyar and Anna. While Vajpayee’s work was leading by example through austerity, rituals, and self-discipline to advocate his ideology, Karunanidhi was also leading by example by breaking all the codified way of life through multiple marriages, wearing black shirts in marriages etc. They were total opposites in their outlook to life.
Vajpayee lived and died for his ideology & principles. He was awarded a Bharat Ratna, the highest honor in India. But Karunanidhi seemed to have lost the plot midway and his focus was more on his own family than the people or his ideology. Karunanidhi’s family was accused in the biggest spectrum of the UPA 2 government and his daughter spent months in Tihar jail. His son Azhagiri has a very bad reputation in South Tamilnadu for his aggressive and violent style. Also, his stand on the Sri Lankan Tamils’ issue also received widespread condemnation from the people of Tamil Nadu and there were countless memes on the internet against Karunanidhi during the last stages of the war in Srilanka. In spite of all his weaknesses, Karunanidhi was an undisputable force who shaped the thinking and minds of people for over 75 years. They were total opposites in their values.
Vajpayee was a 10-time member of the Lok Sabha and two-time Rajya Sabha MP. By comparison, Karunanidhi was a 13-time member of the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly and one-time member of the now non-existent Tamil Nadu Legislative Council. These two leaders appeared and disappeared in the same years. They were poets. They were great orators. They shaped the politics in India for more than five decades. But they sharply differed in their outlook to life. In fact, Karunanidhi gave the biggest compliment for Vajpayee -`The right man in the wrong party’.
Title Credits: Sriram Gutta recommended this brilliant title when I shared with him about my plans to write an article on these two leaders.
