Dr R Mahendran, VP of MNM quits party; alleges direction of MNM and Kamal Haasan not what it was when it started

Coimbatore: In a major development, Makkal Needhi Maiam VP Dr R Mahendran is stepping down as Vice President of the party and also quitting the primary membership of the party allegedly due to the direction in which the party President Kamal Haasan is taking it forward. 

Dr R Mahendran, a renowned doctor in Pollachi and an extremely successful Vanilla farmer has been central to the organisational administration of the party and one of the key successes of the 2019 Parliamentary elections held in Tamilnadu. It was on the back of the nearly 1.5 lakh votes secured in Coimbatore by Dr Mahendran that set the base for party leader Kamal Haasan to contest in Coimbatore South constituency. 

The campaign trail of Kamal Haasan in Coimbatore was stuck between making Kamal Haasan available for the rest of the party and doing campaign in Coimbatore for himself. This lack of focus meant that Kamal Haasan was not available for campaign on the ground for much of the first 10 days of the campaign. In the time that he was here after the initial 10 days, Kamal Haasan campaigned together with Mahendran and vice versa. Kamal Haasan started as the favourite to win the Coimbatore South constituency by a wide margin and yet he lost in a tight battle with Vanathi Srinivasan of BJP. The margin was a meagre 1700 votes. 

Since then, there have been constant murmurs for the past month from various party sources that all is not well in the party. Candidates who contested in Coimbatore were constantly left wondering about the future of the party and that hurt their work on the ground. Following much speculation, Dr Mahendran’s resignation today comes almost as a cliche. 

In his letter to MNM cadres:

“I write this with a heavy heart but clear mind. The events of the last one and a half years and during the Assembly elections and importantly thereafter too, warrants me to resign from the post of Vice-President and as a Primary Member of Makkal Needhi Maiam with immediate effect.




It is my bounden duty to explain to the MNM party colleagues and members as to why I had to take such a tough decision. I’ve also attached my detailed resignation letter to the Party President. I’ve arrived at this decision after a lot of deliberation.

Despite the dismal failure of the party and of the Leader in this year’s Assembly election, I see no hope for any change in the attitude or approach of the President in the functioning of the party. The Leader I knew would always give preference to the ideals of the party and stand shoulder to shoulder with the Party Cadres and Office-bearers. As I leave, I wish that he regains and retains the leadership qualities that he had once displayed.




While Shri. Kamal Haasan was the inspiration for me to enter politics, it is the enthusiastic support from thousands of cadres across the State, which was the motivation for me to face two important elections (Parliament & Assembly) within my two and a half years of being in MNM. I’m sincerely thankful to all of you for that.




My heartfelt thanks to Shri. Kamal Haasan for sowing the seed of Political Service in me. I will strive to work to the best of my abilities in politics and “Be the change you want to see”, a saying which I’ve always held close to my heart and continue to do so.” 

In his personal letter to party President, he details the chronology of circumstances that led to his resignation. He cites neglect, wrong choice of agency to work with and intrusion of Kamal Haasan’s personal advisor TV Mahendran as his primary reasons. 

We are reproducing his letter as is below for our readers: 

Dear Sir,

I write this with a heavy heart but clear mind. At the outset, let me say that I write this to the man I met in May 2018, for whom I decided to enter politics in a party which stood for his ideals. I was more than happy to follow your lead as your Vice-President of Makkal Needhi Maiam, a suggestion which came from you after convincing me from May to September 2018 to enter active politics.




After three years now, the situation warrants me to step down from that role of Vice-President of Makkal Needhi Maiam and the Primary Membership of the Party. This letter to you will explain why.




I will start at the very beginning because “those were really the good days” (April 2018- September2019) when communicating and implementing an instruction from you or sharing views on the way ahead for MNM were joyful things to do. As a matter of fact, from November 2018 to February 2019, we made the party, ‘election ready’ and even contested a Parliament Election no less and garnered both goodwill and vote share which gave us the momentum to come this far.




Today, I’m sad to say, there is a decline in your tenacity of purpose, which lies buried under a style of operation that reeks of a non-democratic manner of running a political party. I’m sure you understand how much it pains me to even write this letter to you. May 2019 to September 2019 were our post-election formative months and there was a great amount of hope in our need to prepare for our next milestone, namely, the TN Assembly elections 2021. We had engaged IPAC’s professional services, which had the track record of having aided the victory of many political parties. But in October 2019, you decided to bring in Sankhya Solutions to handle MNM’s campaign for the 2021 elections, citing that they are an ‘in-house’ team. In retrospect, it is evident that Sankhya’s Head (Mr. Suresh Iyer) and your Key Advisor (ex-TV Media Mr. Mahendran) did not boast of any political campaign experience, knowledge or ability.

 

In fact, I will go as far as to say, they do not even know to enhance or understand Brand Kamal Haasan, leave alone enhance MNM’s prospects.




From October 2019, for nearly six whole months, Sankhya and its core team did not move an inch to enable MNM to forge ahead and be “election-ready” like how the other parties were! But however, their presence and influence inside your core team and within MNM increased considerably and hiring them in this manner also proved to be a financial burden with no tangible returns. The incompetence of Sankhya Solutions and its team as well as that of your Key Advisor was so apparent that I brought this up with you in a private conversation in early 2020 itself. But you chose to rely on them more and more and kept telling me that you will “monitor their activities yourself and Sankhya will be sent out once the Assembly Elections are over and your Key Advisor is only here as your representative for your work and won’t indulge in shadow governance and that they’re all here for a short while only!”

I trusted your assurance and did not discuss my apprehensions on them with any of the MNM office bearers and tried to keep a balance between the Party and Sankhya’s Head and team.




Sometimes our interaction on the aforesaid subject was even an emotional plea (from my end because I wanted to ensure my leader did the right thing and worked with the correct set of people) but most times I felt like I was talking to a man who had made up his mind to believe the lies, the deceit and the sycophancy of those within Sankhya and those Advising him through them. But by mid-2020, Sankhya and your Key Advisor were only dividing the party and employing authoritarian techniques to get their job done.




The result of the Assembly Elections 2021 for MNM, is a direct outcome of the events propelled by Sankhya and your Advisor’s collective manipulation within the party and their abject mishandling of your image/brand outside it. Your failure and the party’s failure in this election can be road mapped to all the schemes and ideas promulgated by Sankhya and your Key Advisor. This is not just my observation - this is also the opinion held by many a party office bearer in MNM, who refrain from voicing their dissent due to fear of consequences!

 

Things came to such a pass that those who were in Sankhya’s and your Advisor’s good books got preferential treatment from you and those who questioned them (including myself on many occasions) were “black-listed”.




I’m writing this note to also record the events of the last many months so it can perhaps make you relook at some of the decisions you’ve made, based on the counsel of Sankhya and/or its office bearers and your Key Advisor.




1. In 2018, you came across as a Leader who knew to give respect and take respect and who was not power hungry, who would consult the CGB and EC on important matters and who would give an equal space for the opinions and suggestions from within the party. Such were your endearing qualities! But from June 2020 all we could see was the opposite. Sankhya and your Key Advisor’s biggest “contribution”, was to have made a multi-faceted party like MNM, pushing for its conversion to a fan club, which you had earlier portrayed to us as something which you did not want! From a Democratic leader who knew how to respect the various achievers in your party, you had now become a man who was happy to sit alone on-stage. I’m sure you will agree that a fan club or welfare association can be run that way but a Political Party in India should not be run thus! The void caused by such ideas, which you willingly accepted, only increased the Divisive Politics within the party which Sankhya and your Key Advisor indulged in, just to be able to “please you” and not show you any concrete result or relationship building for you, both within and outside the party.




2. The party restructuring was something I handled with the General Secretaries from November 2018 to Feb 2020 (when I was told to take a back seat in organization building) and if I may say so, I was quite effective at this restructuring along with the able and hardworking General Secretaries and State & District Secretaries and raised the total number of party cadres, to a sizeable number.

 

Any good organization needs its second and third rung leaders, (something which you’ve been saying of late that you’re “searching for” in MNM) but many able minds are already ignored. We had that foundation ready and going, until Sankhya Head and your Key Advisor chose to enter into party affairs and disrupted its further growth.




At this point, I beseeched you to instruct them to not interfere in the running of the party as their ‘perceived’ competency is only in media campaigns. But that was not to be! This was also evident in the MNM General Body Meeting held on February 2021 where the party stood divided between Sankhya Head and your Key Advisor & their supporters on one side and the true party workers/office bearers/supporters on the other side. Was this what you wanted for your MNM?




3. Next is the very handling of this election - amidst myriad manipulations to counter openly bold and direct people like me inside the party (Sankhya Head and its team were very well- advised here by your Key Advisor) as we entered preparation for the Assembly Election 2021. By this time, none of the key members of the party or office bearers were consulted on any decision. This included the choice of alliance parties, which when “revealed” to us, came as a shock and hit us out of the blue and much worse, as many as 100 out of 234 seats were given away, as instructed by you! This move not only tremendously damaged the image of MNM in people’s eyes but also shattered the morale of the party cadre who had worked tirelessly with his/her heart and soul only for you! Worser still, we were conducting interviews for the very seats that were given away to the Alliance parties! Is this even fair to those who came in trusting they will get a fair chance to represent MNM and you?

 

 4. It was as late as March 11th 2021, when the choice of Your constituency was announced. You will recall that many of us in MNM, including me, had suggested that you should contest from a Chennai AC (like Velachery), if it was the ONLY constituency you were contesting in, because, many of our General & State Secretaries were contesting from Chennai and your presence will further strengthen their campaign prospects. I suggested Kovai as your additional constituency, if you were to contest from TWO seats. Again, we, the Office-Bearers of MNM, got to know only on the 11th of March 2021, that Sankhya Solutions had recommended and proposed only Kovai South as a singular constituency for you. I had called for a Steering Committee meeting on the very same day and put forth my suggestion strongly that if you were contesting only from one, then it should be Chennai. But Sankhya Solutions and your Key Advisor overruled our suggestions and Kovai South it was!




5. The very next day I met you and literally pleaded that “now you’ve chosen Kovai South, please let me handle the campaign on-ground because of my fear that Sankhya’s inefficiencies and inabilities would be disastrous for you”. As fate would have it, you instructed over a zoom call, that ONLY Sankhya Solutions & your Key Advisor (“Chennai team”) will set foot in Kovai South and handle your campaign. Even a week into your Kovai South campaign, I raised enough alarms directly with Sankhya Head and your Key Advisor that your campaign needed urgent course correction and even advised on the steps to be taken. But it all fell on deaf ears!

 

I say this with utmost confidence Sir, that you were able to give a tough fight in Kovai South in this election, because of your own existing brand image and the work done by our party cadres (despite all the mismanagement by Sankhya) and the existing vote share we had garnered from contesting in the 2019 Parliament Election. I asked to lead your campaign in Kovai South for a reason Sir - the reason being I am from the Coimbatore Zone and there is a strategy to campaign and how we present you to the common man and also on the need to have the right people to lead the team on ground. But I was left ignored and at times un-informed and most times, un-welcome. This was a direct contrast to the tenacity of purpose and bond of brotherhood you showed me in 2018 – 2019, which is what gave me the confidence to come into politics by choosing you as my Leader. In midst of the Salem Tour in January 2021, I told you that I would always be behind you as your younger brother and that you should give preference to our Party-workers and not to a team in Sankhya or to your Key Advisor - but you merely assuaged me for the moment and didn’t show any difference in your continued leaning on Sankhya and your Advisor, who ultimately succeeded in separating you, not just from me but from those who truly love and stand by you. They made you feel all alone on this stage of politics Sir. Is this what you wanted for yourself?




In the conversation which happened between us at Kovai during the campaign, when you chose to believe in the false picture which the Sankhya Head gave you about reasons for some cadres not coming to work for you, I again strongly reiterated on their manipulations, like many a time before and asked to be given an opportunity to prove to you, as to what they were up to! But you brushed it aside. Let me say this Sir - that in all these matters, only the party functionaries should have made those calls and assembled teams for you and not a ‘consultant’ team who were indulging in dividing the party into two with the confidence that they had gained over time that you will back them.

 

Your judgment to bring in the Sankhya Head and your Key Advisor, who now stand between you and your own party-members, will prevent any good and effective work from happening even in future. This is a serious issue plaguing MNM and even now there is a chance to course-correct for the sake of many who may still have hope in you and in MNM. True to my word to you, I have, till Assembly Elections, refrained from discussing my fears and apprehensions with any of the party cadre, on this style of non-democratic functioning, because I cared for the party’s morale.




6. While the chronology of events seems to point the arrow at Sankhya Head and your Key Advisor, what was disappointing to me was your willingness to be “managed” by them. I constantly had apprehensions about their ineffectiveness and manipulative methods but I stayed the course, despite the fact that me and many like me were all in this downward spiral along with you, only because of my commitment to you and to the party. I also believed that once we cross the election, we will be able to review and make corrections. But that was also not to be and the machinations of your Key Advisor and Sankhya Head have only grown multi-fold, more now, with your awareness.




You have in the recent past said that the MNM doors for exit is open for people to leave and implied that those who leave are “dishonest and/or incapable”. To that, I have only one thing to say Sir, I can teach a thing or two about “Nermai/Honesty, Ability & Loyalty” to anyone inside and outside MNM, including the Head of Sankhya and your Key Advisor.




I leave with my head held high as an honest and able man with a past I can be proud of and a future that will be built on a strong present.




I resign as Vice-President of MNM and as a Primary Member of the party, because in the last one month post the Assembly Election, I had lost all hope for any semblance of Change in how the party is being run over the past one and a half years.

 

For your own sake and for the sake of the many thousands of party functionaries and members who still believe in you, I urge you to introspect on the undue importance and functioning of your Sankhya Head and your Key Advisor. Sheer sycophants and/or efficient manipulators cannot run a political outfit. We have seen what happens even to the best of leaders when that level of sycophancy and inefficiency is allowed to dominate Democracy.




If this present way of handling people, policy and party-workers continue - there is no future to speak of! If you find your political success by continuing to rely on these methods and the mentioned, I will have to congratulate you on your ‘far-sightedness’!




But in contrast, if my leaving the party now makes you introspect and therefore go back to being the Leader that I met in 2018, then I will applaud you then, immediately and whole- heartedly for making that change and will take pride in having been the catalyst for that change, which will lead to MNM’s betterment.

Loyalty is that virtue which is seen in a person when he or she has many choices but decides to go ONLY with you for your virtue and vision. I will leave you to decipher who your true loyalists are!




I once again thank you for inspiring me to start my innings in politics. As you’re well aware of this quote by Gandhi, “Be the Change you want to see”, I end this letter to you by saying that I’ve always held the saying close to my heart and I will continue to do so.




Yours truly,

Dr. R Mahendran

The quitting of Dr R Mahendran leaves a big void in the upstart political party, MNM, which has been vying to come out as the alternative to Dravidian political parties. The poor showing in the assembly elections and the loss of Kamal Haasan in Coimbatore South constituency were major setbacks as it is. Now with the quitting of Dr Mahendran from the party, it is to be seen how the new startup political party and it’s leader Kamal Haasan will steer into the future.