Long-time RSS functionary, AIADMK leader joins DMK; blames EPS, hails Stalin’s leadership

In a setback to the principal opposition AIADMK, the party’s Organising Secretary and long-time RSS functionary V Maitreyan joined the ruling DMK in the presence of Chief Minister MK Stalin on Wednesday.

He is the second senior leader to desert the party after Anwar Raajhaa, a prominent minority face, who blamed the leadership of AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami (EPS). He was considered a close confidant of the late AIADMK leader and former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa. Minutes after his entry into the DMK, a stunned AIADMK expelled him from the primary membership of the party.

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A three-time Rajya Sabha member from the AIADMK, Maitreyan, a Brahmin, hails from the predominantly Brahmin-dominated Mylapore in the city. An oncologist by profession, he had unsuccessfully contested from Maylapore in the 2021 Assembly election.

With his family’s strong association with the RSS, he had been a member of the Sangh since his early days and served as a State Executive member of the organisation in 1991. From 1995 to 1997, he was general secretary of the BJP’s Tamil Nadu unit, and then briefly its president in 1999. Protesting the BJP’s alliance with the DMK in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls, he quit the party and joined the AIADMK.

In 2016, after the demise of Jayalalithaa, he teamed up with O Panneerselvam but was later admitted into the AIADMK. However, he returned to the BJP in 2023, only to rejoin the AIADMK in September 2024, and was made the Organising Secretary.

After joining the DMK, Maitreyan told the media that AIADMK cadre were in a state of confusion as nothing was moving in the right direction under the leadership of EPS, who, he said, considers himself to be MGR (AIADMK founder and former Chief Minister MG Ramachandran) and Jayalalithaa. “The AIADMK is in the clutches of the BJP, and my services are not being utilised, forcing me to desert the party,” he said. Praising Stalin’s leadership, Maitreyan added, “The Chief Minister is the rallying point for state autonomy for all states. I will be a sepoy of Stalin.”