Vijay Stirs A Political Hornet’s Nest

Chennai: President of Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK), Vijay, stirred a hornet’s nest in State politics through his speech at the party’s State conference in Madurai on Thursday as leaders of the major parties like AIADMK, DMK and BJP slammed him the day after with some of them calling him immature and his speech, particularly to the reference to Chief Minister M K Stalin, as ‘tasteless.’

While AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami had reacted immediately on Thursday at a campaign speech in Kanchipuram, calling Vijay a novice in politics, his senior party colleague D Jayakumar told the media on Friday that there was only one MGR and one C N Annadurai, using whose names frivolously would not fetch votes for anyone.

Since Vijay’s conference had images of MGR and Annadurai along with the figures 1967 and 1977 denoting the years that the two iconic leaders made history by capturing power in the State, Jayakumar said that Vijay was incapable of repeating such feats of those founders of the DMK and AIADMK.

Jayakumar’s suggestion was that Vijay has a long way to go to make a mark in politics, particularly winning the elections and becoming Chief Minister, or even gaining the capability to run a political party.

BJP leader and former Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan was critical of Vijay for attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Referring to Vijay's demand for the retrieval of Katchatheevu from Sri Lanka, she wondered why he did not speak about the Congress party that had acceded the island in Palk Straits to Sri Lanka while attacking Modi.

State Minister and DMK honcho K N Nehru said the manner in which he spoke about a Chief Minister with over four decades of political experience only showed his low standards and lack of class. The people would teach him a lesson in the elections and the DMK, too, would not lag behind in hitting back at him in the hustings, he said.

Many other political leaders like AIADMK’s Vaigai Selvan and Sellur Raju and State Minister for Commercial Taxes and Registration P Moorthy spoke about Vijay’s speech at different places on Friday as media persons were shooting questions on the issue spotting any political leader. All of them unanimously condemned Vijay for his remarks on their respective leaders and said that he was a novice lacking in maturity.

Social media, particularly YouTube channels, on their part, were abuzz with criticism of the TVK conference itself with many of them not putting out videos and interviewing political analysts to only drive home the point that Vijay lacked maturity and political etiquette and accuse him of having delusions of having about his arrival in politics without even knowing the basics about it.

The lack of basic facilities at the conference venue for the participants and the sloppy arrangements gave grist for the social media activists to attack the TVK and its founder