Palaces for the powerful, barricades for the poor: the TVK way of governing

There is a particular cruelty in a government that builds palaces for itself on land promised to the poor. The TVK government wants a ₹1,200-crore Secretariat-Assembly complex on 25.55 acres of sea-facing Foreshore Estate at Pattinapakkam — land acquired in 1957, by the state's own order, exclusively for the rehabilitation and housing of the fishing community. The fishers who have launched their boats from that shore for generations are now told, in effect, that their home is better suited to house power. This is not an isolated misjudgement. It is a pattern. Last week, 4,000 nurses gathered in Chennai demanding fair pay and permanent jobs; five of their leaders were invited to the Secretariat for talks — and arrested. The invitation was the trap. Now the fishers of Pattinapakkam march with black flags, and the state's answer is 200 police personnel, barricades and traffic diversions. Dialogue is a press release; dissent gets a police cordon. Periyar taught that power must justify itself before the last person in the queue, not the first. Anna warned that the state becomes a stranger to its people the moment it begins to admire its own reflection. A government barely months into its tenure is already commissioning monuments to itself while the nurses who keep its hospitals running beg for ₹45,000 a month and the fishers who feed its cities fight for the ground beneath their huts. The ministers say the Secretariat is only at the DPR stage, as if paperwork softens the insult. They say the site is under review, as if review were a concession rather than an admission that the plan should never have been drawn. GO 564 still stands. No minister has sat with the fishing panchayats. The palace proceeds; the people protest. Tamil Nadu has seen this film before — rulers who mistook the chair for the crown. The Dravidian movement was built on the opposite conviction: that the state belongs to the worker, the fisher, the nurse, the tiller — and that any power which forgets this will be reminded, sooner or later, by the very people it barricaded out.