The 'Reels CM' jibe stings because the governance fits between the cuts

Of all the things M.K. Stalin said on the Dharapuram campaign trail last Friday, the one that will travel furthest is the shortest: Vijay is a 'Reels CM'. It is the kind of jibe that works because it feels true before it is even examined — the actor-chief minister, forever mid-shot, treating governance like a shooting spot. Mockery is cheap, and this column is not in the business of defending anyone's dignity. The interesting question is not whether the jibe is fair but why it lands. It lands because the charge underneath it is substantive, and it has receipts. Stalin's receipts, as laid out in Dharapuram: prices rising while the chief minister visits grocery shops only as campaign theatre; the state's GST revenue falling for three consecutive months; complaints piling up over power supply, law and order, and industrial development. These are opposition claims, and they should be tested — but they are claims about governance, not gossip, and they deserve answers rather than roadshows. Then there is the receipt this government wrote itself. On September 21, the TVK government issued an order exempting the Public (Law and Order) Department — the department that handles inquiry reports on police firings, custodial deaths and police torture — from the Right to Information Act. Six days later, after opposition parties called it an open effort to build a police state, the government revoked the order. Reversals are better than persistence, but consider what the first instinct reveals: a four-month-old government whose reflex was to place the files on police violence beyond public reach. And then the bypolls themselves. Madurantakam and Dharapuram vote today because two MLAs resigned within weeks of being elected and defected to the ruling party — the resign-and-return industry this paper has written about before. T.T.V. Dhinakaran's verdict was brutal: a TVK government would be a 'curse', like El Nino, and 'the Chief Minister is responsible for this by-election.' When even the architects of Tamil Nadu's churn politics call the churn a disgrace, the taxpayer footing the bill for a second election in five months is entitled to ask what, exactly, the first one was for. Periyar's test for power was always the same: whom does the institution serve? Anna's was plainer still — watch what walks in and out of the doors of government. By either measure, a government that films well and answers badly is failing the only exam that matters. The reels are free. Accountability is the price — and on polling day, the bill comes due.