Udhayanidhi’s arrest is TVK’s own goal
The remarks made by former Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister and current Leader of Opposition Udhayanidhi Stalin about a female actor are misogynistic. The DMK has said that party supremo Stalin’s son was only criticising the Vijay-led government on the Cauvery water issue, but that explanation cuts little ice — his words carried a double entendre. The immediate weaponisation of the police and law and order machinery by the TVK government against Udhayanidhi is also problematic — he wasarrested a day after his remarks, on a formidable array of charges, including criminal conspiracy, promoting enmity between groups, provoking riots. This rush to target a political opponent by a strong-armed state points to the blurring of lines between government and party. It reeks of a familiar politics of vendetta in Tamil Nadu. For a new government still trying to establish that it represents a break from the past, this is a misstep. That Madras High Court ordered Udhayanidhi’s release is welcome. But the episode raises questions. Actor-turned-politician Vijay rode a popular wave to office on the promise of providing a departure from politics-as-usual under the DMK-AIADMK duopoly that has marked Tamil Nadu for decades, even as he signaled affinity with key figures of the Dravidian movement such as Periyar. The heavy-handed use of state machinery against the Leader of Opposition is reminiscent, however, of dismal episodes featuring his predecessors — the dramatic midnight police swoopdown on M Karunanidhi during Jayalalithaa rule in 2001, for instance. The police has claimed, after the Madras HC order, that it merely wanted to question Udhayanidhi, but the slew of charges in its FIR, filed with alacrity after the ruling party’s complaint, suggests otherwise. In the interval between Udhayanidhi’s statement and the police action, his words were condemned across the political spectrum and by large sections of civil society. That should have been the beginning of a conversation on a broader coarsening of political rhetoric. Instead, the story is now one of executive overreach, with the DMK accusing the government of using the police to settle political scores. That’s an own goal by a party and government on which many in Tamil Nadu pinned hopes for change.
- 1Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression, but Article 19(2) permits reasonable restrictions in the interest of public order, decency, or morality, which is the constitutional basis for provisions like Section 153A IPC used against Udhayanidhi Stalin. As Leader of Opposition, a position of constitutional and statutory significance in India's Westminster-style accountability structure, he holds a role central to legislative scrutiny of the government. Using police machinery against a sitting Leader of Opposition therefore raises heightened rule-of-law concerns about the neutrality of state institutions.
- 2The editorial notes Vijay signalled affinity with Dravidian movement icons like Periyar even while breaking from the DMK-AIADMK duopoly that has governed Tamil Nadu since 1967. The Dravidian movement's Self-Respect ideology, founded by E.V. Ramasamy 'Periyar' in the 1920s, remains a powerful legitimising reference point for any new Tamil Nadu political formation, including the TVK. Vijay's promise of a 'break from politics-as-usual' is thus tested by whether his government's conduct, including this arrest, actually differs from the patterns of the two established Dravidian parties.
- 3Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code, now Section 196 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, criminalises promoting enmity between groups, while criminal conspiracy falls under Section 120B IPC. The Supreme Court's guidelines in Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar (2014) require police to justify arrests for offences carrying under seven years' imprisonment, a standard relevant to assessing this arrest's propriety. The Madras High Court's intervention to order release reflects the judiciary's role under Article 226 in checking potential executive overreach by state police.
- 4The Cauvery water-sharing dispute, which Udhayanidhi's remarks nominally addressed, was adjudicated by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal's 2007 award and later modified by the Supreme Court in its 2018 judgment, which revised the allocation among the basin states. The Cauvery Water Management Authority, established in 2018 pursuant to that judgment, now monitors compliance between Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Puducherry. That this decades-old inter-state water dispute became the backdrop for a political controversy over misogynistic remarks shows how resource disputes remain deeply entangled with everyday Tamil Nadu politics.