Politics in Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu had a bicameral legislature until 1986, when it was replaced with a unicameral legislature, like most other states in India.
Number of Lok Sabha Constituencies : 39
Number of Assembly Constituencies : 234

Regional parties have dominated state politics since 1967. One of the earliest regional parties was the South Indian Welfare Association, which was founded in 1916. It came to be known as the Justice Party after the name of its English-language daily, Justice.

E.V. Ramasami Naicker, popularly known as “Periyar”, renamed the party Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944. DK was a non-political party which demanded the establishment of an independent state called Dravida Nadu. However, due to the differences between its two leaders Periyar and C.N. Annadurai, the party was split.

Annadurai left the party to form the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.The DMK decided to enter into politics in 1956. Nineteenth century Western scholars thought that Dravidian speakers were earlier inhabitants of India than the speakers of the Indo-Aryan languages in the north of the country. It was supposed that the generally darker-skinned Dravidians constituted a distinct race.

This notion corresponded to racial hierarchies of the time according to which darker skinned peoples were more primitive than light-skinned whites. Accordingly, Dravidians were envisaged as primitive early inhabitants of India who had been partially displaced and subordinated by more advanced Aryans.

This concept has affected thinking in India about racial and regional differences and has informed aspects of Tamil nationalism, which has at times appropriated the claim that Dravidians are the earliest inhabitants of India in order to argue that other populations were oppressive interlopers from which Dravidians should liberate themselves. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation in the 1920s, which was attributed to the displaced Dravidians of the north, further fuelled such Dravidianist ideas since it implied that the Indo-Aryans were uncivilised barbarians rather than a “superior race”.

Nehru’s grant of a seperate state essentially forced Tamil nationalism off stage. Instead Tamil regional parties now fight for access to the centra and between each other. The Anti-Hindi agitations in mid-1960s made the DMK more popular and more powerful in the state. The DMK routed the Congress Party in the 1967 elections and took control of the state government, ending Congress’s stronghold in Tamil Nadu. M. Karunanidhi became the party’s leader after the death of Annadurai in 1969.

Karunanidhi’s leadership was soon challenged by M.G. Ramachandran, popularly known as MGR. in 1972, he split from DMK and formed the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). He was the Chief Minister of the state from 1977 until his death in 1987. After the death of MGR, the party split again into two factions, one led by Janaki Ramachandran, wife of MGR, and the other led by J. Jayalalithaa.

After the defeat of AIADMK in 1989 assembly polls, both factions were merged and Jayalalithaa took control of the party. She was elected as the General Secretary of the unified AIADMK. There have been splits in both the DMK and the AIADMK, but since 1967 one of those two parties has held power in the state. Currently, the leader of the AIADMK, J. Jayalilathaa, is the Chief Minister of the state. List of political parties in the state List of Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu