DMK president M.K. Stalin on Sunday said the intention behind the party issuing notice for a no-confidence motion against Assembly Speaker P. Dhanapal was to prevent the possible disqualification of three dissident AIADMK MLAs. This political strategy, he claimed, was not understood by critics, who saw the DMK’s decision to go easy on the motion against the Speaker as a sign of the opposition party’s weakness.
Unveiling the portrait of former Vikravandi MLA K. Radhamani, Mr. Stalin said the party had taken cognisance of the AIADMK’s move to seek disqualification of three dissident AIADMK MLAs – A. Prabhu, V.T. Kalaiselvan and E. Rathinasabapathy.
He said the DMK had adopted a strategy of stalling the government’s move to disqualify the three MLAs by way of a no-confidence motion against the Speaker, since the government would take up the no-confidence motion on priority basis in view of its significance. The Supreme Court had also understood this and had hence stayed the government’s move to disqualify the MLAs, he said.
“Our strategy was to prevent the disqualification of the three MLAs, and hence, we did not insist on the no-confidence motion against the Speaker. There is a strategy and political one-upmanship behind our decision, along the lines of the statesmanship our late party patriarch Karunanidhi had taught us,” he said, adding that this had not been properly understood by the media.
Mr. Stalin said the voters of Tamil Nadu had shown their anger against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP in the recently held Parliamentary election. Though Mr. Modi won big in the rest of the country, he could not sway Tamil Nadu, the DMK leader said.
The people of the State had understood the spirit of the campaign of the secular front and had supported its candidates. But our aim is to ensure that the government headed by Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami is unseated, and that day is not far off, he said.