Kanimozhi: Liveliest

Santiago, April 25: A new Indian political star is rising on the international stage. It rose quietly and away from the accompanying media’s spotlight during President Pratibha Patil’s crowded, nearly fortnight-long journey through Latin America.

Patil’s just-concluded visits to Brazil, Mexico and Chile was the global launching pad for the DMK’s latest political asset: Kanimozhi, its recently elected Rajya Sabha MP and daughter of Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi.

Kanimozhi was to have been launched on a global platform last year, in the opening months of the 62nd UN General Assembly in New York. The DMK had modelled that scrapped launch on the lines of Rahul Gandhi’s first foray on the world stage a year earlier at the 61st UN General Assembly.

The party nominated her as an Indian delegate to the UN General Assembly in autumn last year, the ministry of external affairs processed the nomination and India’s permanent mission to the UN was about to send her name to the General Assembly president’s office when she pulled out.

It is typical of Kanimozhi and her priorities that she opted out of going to New York in October 2007.

In the only interview Kanimozhi gave during the President’s Latin American trip in the last fortnight, she told The Telegraph that she skipped the General Assembly because Chennai Sangamam, a folk arts festival she had helped organise mostly on the streets of the Tamil Nadu capital around the Pongal festival, was in its second year and she wanted to make sure that it would hit no snags.

Chennai Sangamam is an attempt to showcase things that Chennai is all about and it now features about 1,600 folk artistes from across Tamil Nadu every year.

Wherever Kanimozhi went in Latin America, local Tamilians lined up at private and public functions to be photographed with her. The only exception was Chile which has few people of Tamil origin. In Mexico, Ilangovan Kuppusamy, an adviser to the Mexican President, who met Kanimozhi, said it was a matter of pride for him to have a young MP from Tamil Nadu in Patil’s delegation.

In a presidential entourage that was severely short on people who had any exposure to the outside world — except for a sprinkling of foreign ministry diplomats and Rashtrapati Bhavan officials left over from former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s team — Kanimozhi was undoubtedly the star on the Latin American tour.

The elite schooling she received in Chennai’s Presentation Convent and later at the prestigious Ethiraj College and the years that Kanimozhi spent in Singapore with her husband G. Aravindan had prepared her for such a role.

Her years as a journalist at The Hindu, later at an ethnic Indian newspaper in Singapore and her standing as a Tamil poetess made her stand out in a presidential entourage that was severely deficient in intellectual depth.

At every official feast in Latin America, be it on a boat in Brasilia’s stunning man-made Lake Paranoa hosted by Indian ambassador Hardeep Puri or at a lunch hosted by Jalisco’s governor Emilio Gonzales Marquez to the accompaniment of mesmerising Mexican mariachi music at his 17th century palace, Kanimozhi’s table was the liveliest.

Latin American men in formal attire leaned over to speak to her in contrast to some other tables where Indian guests and their hosts ate in strained silence.

Another MP, Nand Kumar Singh Chauhan of the Lok Sabha, hardly spoke to anyone other than fellow Indians during the entire trip. The explanation was that he spoke little English and no Spanish.

In Mexico City, a minister of President Felipe Calderon’s cabinet who was deputed to be with Patil was waiting for her to arrive at the venue of a presidential event. Kanimozhi, in a resplendent Kanjeevaram silk sari and thick, black, loose hair, longer than any Western norm, was the first to arrive.

Steeped in Mexico’s macho traditions that spill over into politics, the minister’s jaws dropped when Indian journalists told him that it was Kanimozhi, an Indian member of Parliament.

Much of what happened during Patil’s tour was choreographed and put together ahead of the presidential visit by Indian ambassadors in Brazil, Mexico and Chile and supervised by Nalin Surie, secretary (west) in the foreign ministry.

The only unplanned, but tangible, outcome of the trip has been initiated by Kanimozhi. She and another Rajya Sabha MP, Mabel Rebello, a former Indian delegate to the UN General Assembly, actively engaged their Chilean counterparts at a meeting with parliamentarians in Santiago who have an interest in India.

Kanimozhi said she would soon begin work on creating an Indo-Chilean forum of parliamentarians on the lines of the ones that already bring Indian MPs together with their counterparts in the US, Germany, Japan and so on.

Clearly, Kanimozhi was aware of the special role that was thrust on her by the composition of the presidential entourage.

She refused a barrage of requests for interviews throughout the trip lest it should upstage the President. Kanimozhi spoke to this correspondent only hours before Patil ended her visit to Latin America and returned home.