Testing the waters: a 'reels government' toys with the people's lifeline

There is a new style of governance in Tamil Nadu, and it deserves a name. It floats an idea in the morning, watches the outrage by afternoon, and quietly withdraws it by evening. It treats the state the way a film unit treats a location: arrive, shoot the scene, pack up, move on. The DMK president calls it a "reels government." The name is unkind. It is also accurate. The latest trial balloon concerns nothing less than Tamil Nadu's two-language policy. When the Governor's address outlined the TVK government's position on language and education, the state's political antennae twitched, and M.K. Stalin said aloud what many were thinking: that the government was "testing the waters" on Hindi imposition, and would U-turn at the first sign of opposition. Whether the suspicion is fair matters less than the fact that it is plausible. A government that has made trial-and-error its signature move has earned the distrust. Understand what is being tested. The two-language formula of Tamil and English is not a line in a policy document. It is the settlement of a mass movement. In 1965, Tamil Nadu's students and workers fought and bled against Hindi imposition, and in 1968 Anna's government gave that resistance constitutional form. Periyar's rationalist movement had spent decades arguing that language is dignity, that a people who surrender their tongue surrender their self-respect. To "test the waters" on this policy is to treat a blood-bought settlement as a pilot episode, renewable if the ratings are good. And test it for whom? Stalin's barb about "North Indian influencers" stings because it names the real audience of so much of this government: the camera. Roadshows are staged, tractor rides are filmed, announcements are timed for the evening feed. Meanwhile prices rise, GST revenue slides, power supply flickers, and the bypoll-eve affidavits of its own candidates raise questions it will not answer. A government that governs by publicity will always mistake applause for consent, and when the applause fades, it mistakes silence for approval too. The Dravidian movement's oldest lesson is that power is borrowed and the people are the masters. Anna said the people are the masters of the land; Periyar said question everything, including the questioner. A government that treats the people's lifeline as an experiment has inverted both lessons: it questions the people's settlement, and refuses to be questioned in return. Tamil Nadu has buried stronger governments than this one for smaller provocations. The waters, Mr. Chief Minister, are not yours to test. They belong to the people, and they remember.