Dismissals, cases, inquiries, nothing could pull him down

Aug 8, 2018, 01.40 AM IST  TOI

Chennai: In the end, M Karunanidhi departed a free soul, unsinged by the umpteen judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings he had battled for about half a century.
Indictments by one-man inquiry commissions and their damning reports apart, nothing could taint him, as, on the day he breathed his last, Karunanidhi had no case pending against him nor had he been convicted in any case, ever. On January 18, 2016, when he visited a court last — wheelchair-bound — for a defamation case hearing, he turned the event into a cadre contact programme, instead of letting it stifle him.

Quite unfailingly, his detractors kept dusting up the R S Sarkaria Commission report against Karunanidhi and his cabinet colleagues, but for all legal purposes the report was not worth the paper on which it had been printed because it was neither accepted nor acted upon. An equally uncomplimentary report was tabled by the Justice Milap Chand Jain commission which probed the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case. It blamed Karunanidhi for harbouring Sri Lankan militants and turning a blind eye to their excesses during their stay in Tamil Nadu. But it remained a report and nothing worthwhile came of it.

A third commission — that of Justice R Reghupathy, formed to probe the suspected corruption in the new assembly-secretariat complex project — has been mired in litigation for more than five years now.

The ‘mini-flyover case’ and his midnight arrest in June 2001 threatened to bog him down during his later years when he had to battle an aggressive J Jayalalithaa. But having fended off the offensive, Karunanidhi saw to it that the case was dropped by police ‘due to insufficient evidence’, days after DMK returned to government in 2006.

That helped him maintain a clean slate on the judicial front till the Jayalalithaa government launched the assembly-secretariat offensive. But that too did not help his detractors drag him to court. Though the Justice Reghupathy commission issued summons to Karunanidhi, it could not enforce his attendance, as the Madras high court stepped in and stayed its proceedings.