In the wake of the defeat of the DMK-led front in this year’s Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, the party’s president and former Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has now announced a massive revamp exercise in the organisation’s structure. An age limit and cap on tenures have been established. This internal restructuring reform is expected to see the exit of several regional satraps from the posts of party district secretaries and give opportunities for many next-generation leaders.
How deftly Mr. Stalin manages to pull off this exercise and what compromises he would be forced to make — such as rewarding family members of incumbents — remains to be seen.
A massive shake-up in ranks is not easy in a legacy organisation. For that matter, even minor shifts are resisted by the seniors. This was evident during the last Assembly elections when former Minister R. Gandhi, aged 81, could not come to terms with and accept the leadership’s decision to give the ticket to his son in Ranipet. Eventually, on the last day of filing nominations, his son Vinod Gandhi withdrew from the race, and Mr. Gandhi ended up entering the race only to be defeated.
In fact, Mr. Stalin’s father, the late veteran M. Karunanidhi, who had steered the party for nearly 50 years, found it hard to effect changes in the organisation over 25 years ago.
In 1999, the DMK top leadership had explored the possibility of enforcing the norm of “one man, one post” in the party. At that time, several senior leaders who held party positions, were also serving as Ministers and MLAs.
The revamp was attempted based on a report presented to Karunanidhi, who was then also serving as Chief Minister, by a five-member committee that probed the party’s performance in the Lok Sabha elections with a focus on “mutual rivalry and groupism” within.
However, even with Karunanidhi at the helm, the party found it difficult to implement this proposal.
In a report titled, ‘Karunanidhi plays it safe’ published on December 12, 1999, The Hindusaid: Even as the DMK’s just-concluded General Council voted to co-opt at least one Dalit and one woman each in the party structure at various levels in the place of “additional secretary,” the DMK President and Chief Minister, Mr. M. Karunanidhi, in a diplomatic coup left the tricky “one-man one-post” issue to the respective individual’s discretion.
While the issue was widely expected to be debated at the meeting of the top policy-making body and the one that preceded it — the meeting of DMK’s District Secretaries and Ministers — at the end of the two-day affair it virtually became a non-issue once the stay-or-leave option was provided to office-bearers.
As the report noted, when Karunanidhi was asked at the press conference later whether he expected party functionaries occupying more than one post to voluntarily give it up, he struck a utopian note, saying, “There is nothing wrong in expecting so.” But it seemed only a mild way of hinting at the underlying complexities.
There was a feeling in party circles then that enforcing the norm could have opened up a Pandora’s box, given the party structure and the loyalties that run deep spanning generations at different levels.
The Hindu wrote: While at the normative level the “one-man-one-post” principle looks a laudable proposition, political party structures being not very different from bureaucratic structures, wherein growth means “more subordinates but not rivals”, sources said that at one level discussing this issue would be futile.
However, there was a change in the thinking of the DMK leadership in early January the following year. In the midst of the party organisational election, short of implementing the ‘one-man one-post’ norm, Karunanidhi and DMK general secretary K. Anbazhagan decided that those contesting for the posts of secretary or deputy secretary for party units from the ward level upwards to the district, panchayat union, town and city units, could at best hold one post in any Government or related organisation.
Anbazhagan said the nominations of those failing to conform to the norm would be rejected by the DMK’s headquarters.
According to a report in The Hindu, while this “bold move” by the DMK would take care of the long-standing loyalties of the senior partymen at the District and Panchayat Union levels — where the multiple-posts problem is acute — sources said the decision would also help spread the other official slots more evenly amongst the cadres, who resented “domination” of most official posts by a single individual.
The report, quoting party sources, said the cadres will be happy as more partymen, who were not holding party posts, would get an opportunity to man official or related posts. In one case, the party leadership had discovered that a district functionary was holding on to as many as eight other non-party posts. ”Such unwieldy office-bearing also reflected upon their performance vis-a-vis party work, even as enlarging the circle of entitlements by restricting district/panchayat union party functionaries to just one post in the Government would boost the morale of partymen in the context of the 2001 Assembly polls, the sources said,” the report said.
On January 15, 2000, Karunanidhi, while participating in a function organised by the Murasoli Trust in Chennai, announced the decision to bar ministers and MPs from throwing their hats into the party electoral ring. He was of the view that the party could register further growth if the district secretaries functioned the way they did while the DMK was in the Opposition.
Published – September 09, 2026 06:30 am IST
