With less than a year to go for the Assembly polls, the ruling AIADMK is making low-profile but steady moves to take on its principal adversary, the DMK.
Informally, the party has roped in the services of Sunil Kanugolu, a strategist who worked for the DMK chief M.K. Stalin till last year. It is called “informal” as the strategist has not been assigned publicly any role. Such an arrangement is nothing unusual as far as the ruling party is concerned, say senior members of the party, adding that an image makeover of Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami is one of the tasks to be carried out by the strategist.
Simultaneously, the party has gone about revamping the information technology (IT) wing, whose functioning, till recently, appeared to have been hit by lack of cohesion among its key members. Four zonal coordinators have been appointed in the place of State-wide wing.
Role defined
Sources in the party say that Mr. Kanugolu’s role will be broadly to get things done through the teams of the four IT zones, which will have volunteers of the party and not paid professionals. Apart from guiding the party’s campaign on social media, he is expected to provide inputs to the party to make its responses to given political scenarios. Certain amount of his work will deal with psephology too and he is likely to indicate the districts to which the AIADMK must pay attention and how it should do.
Packaging Mr.Palaniswami as a personalised communicator and ensuring adequate prominence to Deputy Chief Minister and party coordinator O. Panneerselvam are said to be among the suggestions of the Mr. Kanugolu.
He was said to be the key force behind the extensive ‘Nammaku Naame’ roadshow of Mr. Stalin in the run-up to the 2016 Assembly polls. Though the DMK did not capture power in 2016, Mr. Kanugolu’s work as a strategist was among the factors that is claimed to have catapulted the Opposition-led front to a stunning victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The DMK had then run a relentless political campaign, targetting Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The AIADMK sources feel that having worked with the DMK for a few years, Mr. Kanugolu’s knowledge of inner working of the Opposition party should be useful in fashioning the ruling party’s strategies in the months to come.
