Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) Vice-President Dr R Mahendran, one of the first to join actor Kamal Haasan when he plunged into politics, resigned from the primary membership of the three-year-old party. He pinned the blame on Kamal Haasan, an agency that he hired to oversee the Assembly election, and another aide for his resignation.
Hours later, Kamal hit back at Mahendran calling him a “betrayer” who would have been the first person to be thrown out if there was an exercise to weed out betrayers. “He (Mahendran) is trying to hide his failures, incompetency, and dishonesty by shifting the blame on others,” Kamal said.
Mahendran's resignation from the party came as senior leaders of MNM resigned from their positions after the party's drubbing in the just-concluded Assembly elections. The party not just failed to win any seats but also saw a sharp decline in its vote share – Kamal lost his Coimbatore South seat by a slim margin.
In a 12-page explanation that accompanied the resignation letter, Mahendran blamed Kamal's decisions like hiring Sankhya Solutions and allowing his friend Mahendran, who worked with a popular Tamil entertainment channel, to take decisions on behalf of the party by ignoring seniors who had built the party from the scratch since 2016.
He also said Kamal and his PR team unilaterally decided that he contest from Coimbatore (South) and alleged that party men were not consulted. “You will recall that many of us in MNM, including me, had suggested that you should contest from a Chennai constituency (like Velachery) if it was the only constituency you are contesting in,” Mahendran said.
DH had on December 16, 2020, reported that MNM senior leaders suggested Kamal to contest from Velachery.
In the letter, Mahendran blamed Kamal for handing over the campaign to his PR team, ignoring him who hails from Coimbatore and knows the geography of the city well. He suggested that advice or suggestions from party men were ignored, which led to Kamal's defeat by a slender margin in the constituency.
“I resign as Vice President of MNM and as a primary member of the MNM because in the last one month after 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,” Mahendran said.