From Annadurai To Stalin, DMK Has Embarrassed Itself Twice On ISRO Spaceport Issue

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) was left embarrassed after pictures of a newspaper advertisement by Minister Anitha Radhakrishnan, on the occasion of the foundation stone-laying ceremony of the Kulasekarapattinam spaceport in Thoothukudi district had pictures of Chinese rockets in the background.

The problem was further compounded by DMK's Thoothukudi MP Kanimozhi, who instead of apologising (as was expected by many), defended it by saying, “I don’t know from where the person who did the artwork, found this picture from."

"I don’t think India has declared China as an enemy country. I have seen that the Prime Minister has invited the Chinese PM and they have gone to Mahabalipuram. Just because you do not want to accept the truth, you are finding reasons to divert the issue…," she said.

But this is not the first time that the DMK has found itself in an embarrassing situation over the issue of the spaceport.

Decades ago, Tamil Nadu, under a DMK government, had a chance to have a spaceport but lost out.

Vikram Sarabhai, considered the father of the Indian space programme, had come to meet Chief Minister C N Annadurai regarding the matter. Annadurai, who was suffering from shoulder pain, deputed another minister, Mathiyazhagan, to meet Sarabhai.

Mathiyazhagan, was however drunk and irritated Sarabhai with his demands and incoherence, leading him to decide against setting up the spaceport in Tamil Nadu.

As Nambi Narayan narrates in his book Ready To Fire: How India and I Survived the ISRO Spy Case, the DMK leader’s behaviour and demands is what cost Tamil Nadu a golden opportunity to host India’s only rocket launch pad.

“For launching polar satellites, it was clear to us, our launch pad has to be on the eastern coast. Launching the rocket along the spin of the earth, it gave a huge advantage of cost; also by manouevring the rocket to the south after its initial eastward journey, we avoid flying over any landmass. The coastline of Kanyakumari was considered in the late 1960s, but a terrible mishandling by the government of Tamil Nadu, and a timely pitch by Andhra Pradesh, made Sriharikota happen," he writes.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) understandably seized the opportunity to criticise the DMK.

Addressing a rally in Tirunelveli, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that doing so showed that the DMK did not want to show the achievements of the Indian space sector. He added that this was an insult to Indian scientists and asked people to teach the party a lesson for using their tax money for such purposes.

Criticizing the DMK, BJP state president K Annamalai, who has just concluded his ‘En Mann En Makkal’ padayatra, also wrote about the aforementioned incident.

In the 1960s, the spaceport went to Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. But today, as ISRO has returned to Tamil Nadu, the DMK finds itself in a soup once again with this gaffe.