Two years after his death, former DMK president and five-time Chief Minister M.Karunanidhi’s 97th birth anniversary saw a bitter war on Twitter with his supporters and political critics clashing virtually.

While DMK leaders, supporters and sympathisers used the hashtag #HBDfatherofModernTamilNadu to remember Karunanidhi as a multifaceted personality, his critics took special effort to trend the hashtag #HBDFatherofCorruption, although the late leader was not found guilty of corruption by any court of law.

A couple of other negative hashtags also were trending in Tamil.

DMK IT wing secretary and MLA Palanivel Thiagarajan, charged that the ruling AIADMK was behind the negative campaign. “This merely proves that the AIADMK is so incompetent that they try to attack the legacy of DMK leader M. Karunanidhi, who passed away two years ago, instead of talking about their government’s achievements in the last nine years,” he said.

“What Jawaharlal Nehru is to India, Kalaignar is to modern Tamil Nadu,” he contended. “Just as the incompetent BJP tries to tarnish the image of Jawaharlal Nehru, who died decades ago, the AIADMK which has mismanaged the economy and the State’s response to the pandemic, is attacking a giant like Kalaignar to mask its incompetence,” he said.

Mr.Thiagarajan claimed that he had data and analysis to prove that the DMK’s campaign had been organic unlike the “hate propaganda”, which he alleges was run with ‘bots’ and with the help of digital server farms outside India.

He also accused ‘Naam Tamilar Katchi’, some of whose cadres had launched a counter propaganda online, of working “as stooges of the Hindutva BJP”, which the DMK leader felt, was working to erase the Tamil identity that the party claims underpins its entire political agenda.

However, AIADMK IT wing (Chennai zone) in-charge, ‘Aspire’ Swaminathan, claimed that the anti-Karunanidhi hashtag was “organic” and devoid of any “plant”.

“It was not organised by our party. The DMK had a campaign ‘HBDFatherofModernTamilNadu’, we released a counter video, which said #HBDFatherofcorruption. As they worked with a plan, you could see majority of the posts came from the DMK people. Whereas for us, the common people caught on to #HBDFatherofCorruption,” he claimed.

“This shows the sentiments of the common people,” he added.