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Last Updated:May 08, 2026, 09:43 IST
When voters split their verdict, backroom doors open. Tamil Nadu's hung assembly has set off a quiet scramble where yesterday's enemy could be tomorrow's ally.

In Indian politics, there are no permanent enemies — only permanent ambitions. The same hands that pointed fingers across the aisle are now reaching across it. The game of power never changes; only the players rearrange.

DMK and AIADMK — decades of rivalry, competing legacies, and the long shadow of two towering leaders. Yet history whispers that ideology bends when a chair is at stake. Tamil Nadu watches, and waits.

Maharashtra showed us first. Shiv Sena — born of Hindutva fire — sat down with Congress at the same cabinet table in 2019. It lasted three years before the weight of contradiction brought it all down. The lesson was written clearly, yet others keep reading it too late.

Mehbooba Mufti and Narendra Modi shared a stage, a handshake, and a government — while standing on opposite sides of Article 370. When the law fell in 2019, so did the alliance. In Kashmir, trust has always been the first casualty of power.

TDP was born to fight Congress. N.T. Rama Rao built it brick by brick as a wall against them. Thirty-five years later, that wall became a bridge. Politics doesn't erase history — it simply ignores it when convenient.

Nitish Kumar has changed sides so many times that political observers have stopped counting — and started using him as a textbook example. In Bihar, loyalty is not a value. It is a variable.

In West Bengal, the Left and Congress spent 34 years tearing each other apart. In Kerala, they still do. But in Bengal, Mamata changed the equation — and old enemies found new reason to stand together. Geography, it turns out, shapes ideology too.

Party workers hum the old song — "children of one mother, one clan, one leader." But political experts ask the harder question: when two rivals merge for survival, which identity survives? Alliances may win elections. They rarely preserve legacies.
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