Kanimozhi Karunanidhi (born 5 January 1968) is an Indian politician, poet and former journalist. The daughter of M. Karunanidhi, five times Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, she is deputy general secretary of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and leads the party in Parliament. She sat in the Rajya Sabha from 2007 to 2019 and has represented Thoothukudi in the Lok Sabha since 2019. She was tried and acquitted in the 2G spectrum case.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Kanimozhi Karunanidhi |
| Born | 5 January 1968, Madras (now Chennai), Tamil Nadu |
| Age | 58 |
| Party | Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam |
| Offices | Member of the Lok Sabha, Thoothukudi (since 2019); Member of the Rajya Sabha (2007–2019); Deputy General Secretary, DMK (since 2022) |
| Occupation | Politician, poet, journalist |
| Education | Ethiraj College for Women, Chennai (M.A. Economics) |
| Parents | M. Karunanidhi and Rajathi Ammal |
| Spouse | G. Aravindan (m. 1997) |
| Children | 1 son |
Early Life
Kanimozhi is the daughter of Karunanidhi and Rajathi Ammal. She grew up in Chennai, in a house filled with writers and politicians, went to school at Church Park and took a master’s degree in economics at Ethiraj College. M. K. Stalin is her half-brother.
Journalist and Poet
She worked as a sub-editor at The Hindu, edited the Tamil weekly Kungumam and was a features editor at a Tamil newspaper in Singapore, where she lived for some years after her marriage. She has published several collections of poetry, among them Karuvarai Vasanai, Agathinai and Paarvaigal, which deal with women’s inner lives, the body and loss, and has written lyrics and scripts. In 2007 she was one of the organisers of Chennai Sangamam, an annual open-air festival that brought folk performers from the districts to the city’s parks and beaches.
Political Career
Rajya Sabha and the 2G case
Her father brought her into politics in 2007, when she was elected to the Rajya Sabha. She was seen as the party’s link with the national capital and with writers, and spoke on the rights of women, transgender people and Sri Lankan Tamils.
In 2011 the Central Bureau of Investigation named her in the case concerning the allocation of second-generation mobile spectrum in 2008. It alleged that money paid to Kalaignar TV, a channel in which she held a share, was a bribe connected with the licences. She was arrested on 20 May 2011 and spent about six months in Tihar Jail before being granted bail. On 21 December 2017 a special court acquitted her, the former telecom minister A. Raja and all the other accused, holding that the prosecution had failed to prove any of its charges. The agencies appealed to the Delhi High Court.
Lok Sabha
In 2019 she contested a direct election for the first time, at Thoothukudi, a port town still angry over the police firing of 2018, and defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party’s state president by a large margin. She was re-elected in 2024 by nearly four lakh votes. She became the party’s deputy general secretary in 2022 and leader of its members in Parliament in 2024. In 2025 she led one of the all-party delegations of members of Parliament sent abroad by the government to explain India’s position after the military strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan.
She campaigned across the southern districts in the Assembly election of April 2026, in which the DMK lost power after one term and finished second.
Views
She is a rationalist in the tradition of the Dravidian movement and a consistent opponent of the imposition of Hindi, and has argued in Parliament for a third of legislative seats to be reserved for women.
Personal Life
She married G. Aravindan, a Singapore-based writer, in 1997, and they have a son, Adithyan.
Featured image: Kanimozhi Karunanidhi in December 2020. Photo by Kalaignarist, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
