There was something Kafkaesque about it when Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters in Chennai, waited to receive expelled AIADMK leader O Panneerselvam on Feb 27. “I am a cage, in search of a bird,” Franz Kafka had written, around 1917. Almost 110 years later, as the 75-year-old three-time chief minister walked into the building, Kafka flipped in my mind. OPS seemed to say, “I am a bird, in search of a cage.”

On afterthought, it became clear that Kafka’s original (well, the English translation of his haunting German diary scribble) didn’t suit the occasion. The cage, which already had many birds, wasn’t longing for one more, nevertheless it was happy to take this one which chose to fly in. Defying the poetic depiction of caged birds, OPS started singing as soon as he got in. “Thalapathi (chief minister M K Stalin) is the only leader who protects the Dravidian race and ideology … AIADMK has no future as Edappadi Palaniswami (party general secretary) has been taking the party down the road to destruction.”

Ever since July 2022, when AIADMK general council expelled him from the party, OPS has been a bird so free that he soon started longing for a cage. For he knew he couldn’t fly too high – not that his wings were clipped, he didn’t have much of a wing after his own supporters moved to DMK and the other AIADMK oustees found their own ways – T T V Dhinakaran back in NDA, and V K Sasikala in her own imaginary party. Every time his plea to BJP leader Amit Shah to impress upon EPS to re-induct him into AIADMK met with indifference or helplessness, OPS found a new insult over his injury. “Do I go and join the Sankara mutt?” OPS recently said in response to a reporter’s query. Anna Arivalayam turned out to be a better refuge.

His post-rehab ambition should be modest – an MLA seat for himself (what if DMK makes him the speaker, to cock a snook at AIADMK?), a new beginning for his son and former MP P Ravindranath. And what would be his utility for DMK? Arithmetically limited, psychologically considerable. The AIADMK-BJP combine has been breathing easy on the thevar votes of the south since TTV returned to the alliance, yet OPS and Sasikala, as parallel spoilsports, can harm the NDA’s prospects in a handful of seats. OPS foul-mouthing EPS would not surprise voters, but when he starts telling ‘inside stories’ of AIADMK’s subservience to BJP, Stalin will have more reasons to grin.

Taking OPS into its fold was not entirely an act of kindness on the part of DMK (Stalin, while welcoming OPS, called him “an affectionate and humble” person). Besides his limited firepower against AIADMK, the induction of OPS soon after three others from AIADMK – Anwhar Raajhaa (Muslim), Manoj Pandian (Christian) and R Vaithilingam (a delta man), completes a quartet of utility.

OPS’s migration to the rival camp reiterates that politics is not just the art of the impossible, it is a gallery of ironies too. When a man whose rewards came from his loyalty submits his allegiance at the feet of his adversary, it marks the nadir of self-respect, the zenith of servility. It also embodies the politics of survival. Confronted by the skies of uncertainty and the storms of adversities, the bird had to find a cage.

As OPS sings new songs, here is one from Maya Angelou’s 1983 poem ‘Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing’.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
Of things unknown
but longed for still …

The caged bird sings not because he is happy, but because silence would mean surrender.

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