DMK’s post-breakup letter spells it out: Rahul Gandhi is the problem

For years, the Congress in Tamil Nadu occupied a peculiar place in Dravidian politics. It was too weak to threaten the DMK, too useful to discard, and too dependent to negotiate as an equal. The arrangement survived election after election because both sides understood its logic. The Congress brought a national face, the DMK supplied almost everything else.

That arrangement is now over. And if one wants to understand how bitter the divorce has become, one need only read the latest editorial in ‘Murasoli’, the DMK’s official mouthpiece, published on Sunday.

The article is not merely an attack on Rahul Gandhi. It is an attempt to explain, justify and emotionally process what many in the DMK view as a political betrayal after Congress legislators left the DMK-led alliance and joined the Vijay-led government.

The headline question posed by the editorial is deceptively simple: How can Rahul Gandhi lecture others about opposition unity when, according to the DMK, he has spent years undermining it? The piece begins with an argument that has become increasingly common among regional parties within the INDIA bloc. Rahul Gandhi, it suggests, speaks the language of unity nationally while practising a different politics in the states.

The editorial’s principal exhibit is Kerala. It recalls Rahul Gandhi’s repeated attacks on Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and the CPI(M), particularly his allegation during election campaigns that there existed a “secret understanding” between the Left and the BJP. That charge has long infuriated Communist leaders.

At the recent INDIA alliance discussions, CPI(M) leaders reportedly confronted Rahul directly over those remarks. The Murasoli editorial prominently cites CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas, who argued that the Left did not require certificates from Congress regarding its anti-BJP credentials. The article also invokes CPI General Secretary D Raja’s criticism that Rahul’s comments reflected “political immaturity.”

The underlying complaint is larger than Kerala. Regional parties increasingly believe that Congress demands solidarity from allies during parliamentary elections while often behaving like a competitor during state elections. The editorial’s most cutting line may be its suggestion that Congress asks regional parties to help defeat the BJP nationally after spending years trying to weaken those same parties locally.

In other words: Congress wants coalition politics in Delhi and competition everywhere else. The DMK’s anger, however, is not really about Kerala. It is about Tamil Nadu.

The Congress won five Assembly seats as part of the DMK-led alliance in the 2026 election. Within weeks, those legislators crossed the political divide and entered the Vijay-led coalition government. To DMK leaders, this was not merely political realignment. It was abandonment.

The editorial repeatedly suggests that such a move could not have happened without the knowledge – or at least the blessing – of the Congress leadership. That accusation remains politically explosive because it converts what might otherwise have been seen as legislative pragmatism into something resembling organised desertion.

The article’s emotional tone is also revealing. Historically, the party’s harshest attacks were directed at ideological opponents such as the BJP or electoral rivals such as the AIADMK. Now Rahul Gandhi is being discussed in language once reserved for adversaries.

The editorial repeatedly portrays him as a leader whose actions have weakened opposition unity in state after state. It cites complaints attributed to Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav and others as evidence that dissatisfaction with Congress extends well beyond Tamil Nadu.

The DMK wants to establish a narrative: that the crisis inside the INDIA alliance is not the product of ideological differences but of Congress behaviour. There is also unmistakable sarcasm running through the article. Rahul Gandhi’s remark that Congress must absorb criticism “like Lord Shiva drinking poison” receives particularly mocking treatment.

According to the editorial, even the mythology Rahul invokes undermines his argument. In the story, Shiva did not create the poison. He merely consumed it. If poison now circulates within the opposition alliance, the editorial asks, who created it in the first place?

Behind the rhetoric lies a larger political reality. The rise of Vijay and the formation of the TVK-led government have destabilised every major political arrangement in Tamil Nadu. The AIADMK split vertically before partially reuniting. Congress crossed over into government. VCK and IUML recalibrated their positions. Left parties now find themselves navigating new equations. The DMK, long accustomed to being the gravitational centre of opposition politics in the state, suddenly finds itself more isolated than at any point in recent memory.

That isolation helps explain the intensity of the attack. The editorial is ostensibly about Rahul Gandhi. In reality, it is also about the DMK itself.

It is a party trying to explain how an alliance it once led unravelled so quickly, a party trying to persuade its cadre that loyalty flowed in only one direction, and a party attempting to assign responsibility for a political rearrangement that has left it diminished. For years, the Congress was treated as the DMK’s junior partner. Today, in the pages of Murasoli, it is being treated as something closer to a repeat offender.

That may ultimately be the most significant message in the editorial. The DMK is no longer speaking as though reconciliation is inevitable. It is speaking as though the break-up is complete.