Karunanidhi’s street house at Gopalapuram (above) and a tea factory at Jayalalithaa’s Kodanadu estate in the Nilgiris

Chennai, Dec. 29: If where you live reveals the truth about you, this is how M. Karunanidhi would like to contrast himself and Jayalalithaa.

A chief minister who roughs it in a “street house” and a rival who luxuriates in a hill estate.

The octogenarian Karunanidhi has denied his family is among Asia’s richest, claiming he is the only chief minister who continues to live in a “street house”.

In local parlance, the term describes a house that shares a common wall with another on each side — what the Americans call a “row house” and the British a “terraced house” or “town house”.

Karunanidhi also claimed his “street house” was his only property, bought with his earnings as a film scriptwriter before he became chief minister for the first time in 1969.

“Unlike others, I do not own bungalows, farmhouses, gardens or estates,” he said on Wednesday, clearly alluding to Jayalalithaa who had alleged that Karunanidhi’s family was rolling in money in spite of his humble beginnings.

Jayalalithaa herself not only owns a bungalow in Chennai’s posh Poes Garden but also a grape garden in Hyderabad, both bought with her earnings as an actress in the ’60s and ’70s. She also regularly rushes off to a farmhouse outside Chennai.

But the longest holidays she spends are at a sprawling estate in Kodanadu near Ooty, 535km from here, that she and her friend Sasikala had bought in 1995 during her first stint as chief minister.

What Karunanidhi glossed over while describing his lifestyle, though, was his second wife Rajathi’s posh Chennai bungalow and the properties owned by his sons Alagiri, Stalin and Tamilarasu — and how they came to acquire them.

Alagiri lives in a huge bungalow in Madurai and, when he is in Chennai, in a farmhouse just outside the city. Stalin bought his own house in Velachery in Chennai a decade ago but recently moved into a swankier bungalow off TTK Salai, 2km from his father’s official home. Tamilarasu, a businessman, has his own home at Gopalapuram, a few houses away from his father’s.

The DMK veteran’s two-storey “street house” at Gopalapuram, too, has kept pace with his growing power over the decades.

Today, most of the house is air-conditioned and a lift has been installed to allow the wheelchair-bound patriarch to access his first-floor study and bedroom. It’s hardly the sort of simple living quarters he would project it as.

Although Karunanidhi has made a big noise about donating the house for a hospital after his and his wife’s death, the old-style building can at best be used as a clinic. It would be difficult to even wheel in a stretcher through the narrow doorways.

Besides, Karunanidhi has of late shown a preference for the more comfortable and spacious bungalow of his second wife at CIT Colony, just 1km from his official residence, for his political confabulations such as during the A. Raja crisis last month.

“He spends more time at the CIT Colony house (where daughter Kanimozhi also lives) because it is far more spacious and has more modern amenities. Of course, he makes it a point to be at his Gopalapuram house in the mornings,” said a senior official who meets the chief minister almost every day.

For Jayalalithaa, the Kodanadu estate has emerged her favourite destination outside Chennai. So much so that immediately after her televised offer of support to the Congress on November 11, she flew off to Coimbatore from where she choppered over to the Kodanadu estate. She returned to Chennai only last Sunday.

For someone who likes to operate from behind an iron curtain, the 850-acre property is an ideal location.

After her defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Jayalalithaa had spent a record 112 days at the estate, inviting DMK derision about how she had gone into hiding. In the past, her grape garden-cum-farmhouse outside Hyderabad used to be her favourite retreat.

In July 2008, when she decided to boycott five Assembly by-elections claiming they were being rigged by the DMK, her party’s executive met at the estate, where Jayalalithaa was vacationing.

“Rather than Jayalalithaa going over to Chennai, or even nearby Coimbatore, 20 members of the executive had to come all the way to Kodanadu,” an AIADMK official said.

In 2007, Jayalalithaa had claimed that the estate belonged to a friend till Karunanidhi distributed the 2006 balance sheet of the estate (a limited company) to prove that she and Sasikala had invested Rs 3.6 crore in the property and that they jointly owned it.

The Kodanadu property has also been at the centre of other controversies. For instance, there have been complaints about the compound wall cutting off public access to a road running through the estate, violating rules.

Why does Jayalalithaa spend such long periods at Kodanadu? One reason offered is that she needs to conduct special pujas and yajnas there while alterations are made to her Poes Garden bungalow in keeping with Vaastu advice. Another is that the estate’s salubrious environs are conducive to the Ayurvedic treatment she takes regularly.

Asked how a political leader could operate from such a distant isolation, Jayalalithaa had once retorted: “Kodanadu is also in Tamil Nadu. And in this communication era, one can operate from anywhere.”

One of her party MPs said: “Sonia Gandhi too operates in a similar style, with only her political managers keeping in touch with party leaders. But that is not made into an issue.”