On May 4, actor-politician C Joseph Vijay stormed the political box office in Tamil Nadu. Vijay’s win seemingly marked a rupture with the Dravidian politics that dominated the state for six decades. However, the new chief minister’s pronouncements on the LTTE and its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, and the Centre’s two-language policy suggest that the TVK is more a mutated version of the old Dravidian political lineage, and less a complete break with the past. This may ruffle his new admirers,
On May 4, actor-politician C Joseph Vijay stormed the political box office in Tamil Nadu. Vijay’s win seemingly marked a rupture with the Dravidian politics that dominated the state for six decades. However, the new chief minister’s pronouncements on the LTTE and its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, and the Centre’s two-language policy suggest that the TVK is more a mutated version of the old Dravidian political lineage, and less a complete break with the past. This may ruffle his new admirers, but it could help Vijay and the TVK plug into the Tamil political ecosystem that has historically privileged social justice and linguistic nationalism over other agendas.
Vijay’s views on the two-language policy is in continuation with the previous DMK government’s stance that drew its rationale from the political lineage and emotional inheritance of anti-Hindi agitations that catapulted the party to office in the 1960s. However, the exigencies of office demand that he nuance his opinion on Tamil nationalism. This Sunday, Vijay mourned the victims of Mullivaikkal, the last stand of the Tamil Eelam Movement in 2009 in northern Sri Lanka, and Prabhakaran, who was killed on May 18 that year. The TVK founder has always been an ally of the Eelam cause: There is near consensus in Tamil Nadu over the political rights of Sri Lankan Tamils, even if many are critical of the violence the LTTE unleashed within and outside Sri Lanka on both the Sinhalese and its Tamil critics. But how far can a chief minister go in offering eulogies to an outfit banned by New Delhi and held guilty of assassinating a former Prime Minister of India (leader of a party that is now an ally)? What may be alright for an actor, or even a politician, may not be for a person holding down a constitutional office.
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