Despite all the hard work that went into putting together the Democratic Progressive Alliance, a formation that the 81-year-old Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam patriarch, M. Karunanidhi, hoped to take forward in the next assembly elections, a political crisis seems to be awaiting him.

The DPA experiment was a huge success in the last Lok Sabha elections. Combining the vote-banks of the DMK, the Congress, Vaiko?s Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, S. Ramadoss?s Pattali Makkal Katchi, the two main left parties and the Muslim League, the DPA bagged all the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, giving J. Jayalalithaa her worst electoral drubbing in recent memory.

The DMK, naturally, is keen to promote the formation as a secular OBC-Dalit-minorities alliance. Though there is still a year to go before the assembly polls, scheduled for April-May 2006, opposition leaders anticipate that Jayalalithaa may go in for an early election anytime after September 2005. Karunanidhi is thus being extra-cautious not to commit a faux pas that may allow Amma to set the cat among the pigeons.

But the crisis that threatens Tamil Nadu is not just the break up of this alliance or the resurgence of saffron politics (now that the Bharatiya Janata Party has got further alienated from Jayalalithaa following the Kanchi Math episode. The sangh parivar in fact has vowed to defeat Jayalalithaa for being anti-Hindu and setting the police on the sankaracharya). The crisis is in leadership ? both of the DMK and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam which have alternately held power since the Congress lost Tamil Nadu in 1967.

Despite Karunanidhi?s advancing age, the DPA allies want him to lead the next government as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu for the fifth time, should they win at the hustings. However, within the DMK, a section feels that this time Karunanidhi should let his son, M.K.Stalin, ?lead their army in the ensuing electoral battle?. At the recent DMK conference in Dindigul, the party?s student-wing leader and former parliamentarian, Trichy N. Siva, openly called for a larger role for Stalin. Another orator, Vetrikondan, had a slightly different solution. ?Let the chief ministership be with Karunanidhi, but please give the police portfolio to Stalin to show Jayalalithaa her place.? These are of course internal matters of the DMK and only the coming days will reveal how they are tackled by the party and its veteran general- secretary, K. Anbazhagan.

As for the AIADMK, Jayalalithaa?s image make-over is yet to win her new friends. Her calculation that the special task force?s gunning down of Veerappan last October would swing middle-class sympathy her way and the sankaracharya?s arrest would tilt OBC-minority sentiment towards her are yet to bear fruit.

Yet these are brownie points no doubt. Add to these her management of the post-tsunami relief and rehabilitation efforts ? she put together an effective team of top IAS officials comprising Shanta Sheela Nair, Vivek Harinarayan, J. Radhakrishnan in Nagapattinam, Gagandeep Singh Bedi and C.K. Gariyali in Cuddalore, led by the unflappable finance secretary, N. Narayanan in Chennai ? which won her appreciation from no less a person than the Union minister for petroleum, Mani Shankar Aiyar, her trenchant critic.

On the state?s economic front too, Jayalalithaa has some reasons to smile. Foodgrains production in the current year has gone up to 90 lakh tonnes after three years of continuous drought, her government has revived the massive Rs 5,000 crore lignite mining-cum-power generation project at Jayamkondam, and a leading car manufacturer from Korea has announced the setting up of a second car manufacturing plant with an investment of Rs 2,200 crore near Chennai.

Notwithstanding all these positive developments, Jayalalithaa, barring the support of the dominant Thevar community in the southern districts, is today politically friendless. This is a factor being fully put to use by DPA allies, even as a special court in Bangalore has just begun its hearing on her Rs 66 crore case against the possession of disproportionate assets.

As the personality cult matters more in Tamil Nadu than perhaps in any other state, it is crucial whether the battle lines for the assembly polls are drawn on the basis of ?DPA versus Jayalalithaa?, or ?Karunanidhi versus Jayalalithaa?, or ?Karunanidhi and Sonia Gandhi versus Jayalalithaa? or ?Stalin versus Jayalalithaa?. This is a key aspect of the looming political crisis.

Former Tamil Nadu Congress committee president and Union minister of state for commerce, E.V.K.S. Elangovan, has said that it is time for the state Congress to demand ?a share in power? at the state level if the DPA won the assembly elections. The demand has, in one stroke, upset the DPA?s fragile applecart. The issue even threatened to rupture DMK-Congress ties, as Elangovan?s plea got enmeshed in his alleged personal remarks against the DMK chief. A crisis was averted only with the personal intervention of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh.

Significantly, the Congress?s aspirations in Tamil Nadu has been nipped in the bud not by Elangovan, but by the MDMK leader, Vaiko. At the Dindigul conference, Vaiko reminded that the DMK, as the vanguard of the Dravidian movement, was committed to state autonomy and more powers to the states in a genuine federal set-up. Hence the question of considering power-sharing at the state-level with the Congress would strike at the very roots of one of its fundamental political objectives.

Doubly thanking Vaiko for bringing up this perspective, Karunanidhi made it clear at Dindigul that a pre-poll ?programmatic? political alliance, like the one in West Bengal and Kerala, was not the model that Tamil Nadu had adopted in 1967, when the ?rainbow alliance? against the Congress was fashioned. The ?electoral alliance? was put together to fight the polls together and it was the dominant party which invariably formed the government later, argued Karunanidhi, ruling out the possibility of a coalition government in Tamil Nadu. The DMK may have won the argument with its allies on this point, but the political road ahead seems far from smooth.