Reporter’s Diary: Duraimurugan stuns Stalin by meeting BJP leaders on the sly

Just when it appeared the duo had buried the hatchet over the I-T raid fiasco during the Vellore Parliamentary bypoll, the octogenarian treasurer got on the nerves of the party chief again. 

This time, doing something even bigger. Stalin was upset by an alleged unscheduled and secret visit of Duraimurugan to the national capital in the recent weeks. More than the visit, it is the secretiveness of the visit, ostensibly, to meet a couple of movers and shakers in the ruling BJP in New Delhi that has annoyed Stalin. 

Grapevine has it that Duraimurugan had informed Stalin that he would keep away from party headquarters, Anna Arivalayam, for a week owing to illness. A considerate Stalin had even wished him a speedy recovery.

However, the DMK chief was caught off guard when his team informed later that the treasurer was not convalescing in his native Vellore, but had flown to the capital to meet a BJP lobbyist to ‘settle’ the damage caused by the earlier I-T raid. The big shock to the DMK helm was the person who had facilitated the meeting for its treasurer. An influential leader of the AIADMK was learnt to have liaised with his BJP contacts to fix it for Duraimurugan, understandably, reciprocating to the helping hand lent to him a decade earlier during the last DMK regime.