Superstar Vijay, a rally, and a town under siege: Perumal Murugan’s account

“On Saturday, September 27, the first town where Vijay came and spoke was Namakkal,” Murugan begins. “Because of the Karur tragedy, the reports of the Namakkal meeting did not appear much, and whatever appeared also did not get attention. As a resident of Namakkal, I wish to record what I saw and what I inquired and learned. This may be taken as a press note.”

The piece is striking in its frankness — neither in the language of campaign reports nor television news tickers. It is the language of a man walking through his own town, watching it bend under the weight of a new political spectacle.

A stage built on banners

Two days before the rally, Murugan had wandered down Salem Road, where the meeting was to be staged. He notes how the site itself seemed ill-suited. Shops lined both sides, the road narrow, the only way to hold a speech being to stop right there, in traffic.

After the stampede, in his video message on September 30, 2025, Vijay said the government may do “anything to him,” for the stampede but should spare his party men. (Express photo by Arun Janardhanan)

“The plan was that Vijay would stop at one place and speak for twenty to thirty minutes. People along the road would watch him, be satisfied, and return home. That was why they chose this spot, I thought,” he writes.

But what caught his eye were the banners — huge sheets blocking a quarter of the road. They had no permission. The police had warned, photographed them, but the party men ignored the orders. The fines were too small to matter.

Here, Murugan’s tone is dry, almost amused. He sketches the petty defiance of local cadres, men certain they could pay off the state with a day’s earnings.

A retired policeman’s advice

The TVK had sent a retired deputy superintendent to Namakkal, a man once in charge of policing the district. He came two days ahead. His advice was practical: fence off the transformers with tin sheets, remove the giant banners, arrange a medical camp, provide water at six places. Even cut down some of the thirty-foot flag poles. “When the campaign vehicle stops, and Vijay speaks, the poles may lean and fall,” he warned.

But, Murugan notes, “the district leadership did not follow all of it. They followed some, and ignored the rest.”

This refusal, he suggests, would later define the rally — a half-hearted order, a careless execution.

‘Bussy’ – The General Secretary

Murugan’s essay turns toward ‘Bussy’ Anand, TVK’s general secretary. Anand had arrived early, shuttling between Namakkal and Karur. He checked the flagpoles himself, shaking them to see if they were planted deep enough. But as the man who decides party responsibilities next to Vijay, he was surrounded by functionaries eager for attention. “He looked at the place only in name, then left quickly,” Murugan records.

There is also a subplot of caste and ambition. The West District Secretary, Sathish Kumar, shared Anand’s caste, a minority in Namakkal. His hopes of an election ticket were slim. Instead, a wealthy Gounder backer was spending on rallies, expecting the seat. Murugan describes this quietly, but the politics is unmistakable: communities trading money for chances, leaders orbiting Vijay’s favour.

A Schoolyard Start

Vijay landed in Trichy at 8.50 am, even though permission for the Namakkal speech was granted for 8.45 am. From there, the campaign bus was not stopped two or three kilometres outside town, as expected. Instead, it was parked inside a school compound, 25 km away. Teachers and students screamed when they saw him.

From there began an unpermitted roadshow. “To cover the twenty-five kilometres took more than three hours,” Murugan writes. The bus crawled forward. People crowded the road. Inside, Vijay waved. Outside, faces pressed against the glass.

By 2.30 pm, he entered Namakkal. By 2.45, he began to speak on Salem Road.

The thirst and the waiting

The picture Murugan paints is less of a rally than of “a town under siege.” People had arrived at dawn, at five o’clock. Shops closed. Food and water vanished.

“Most of those present came from rural areas,” he writes. “They did not have the habit of carrying water or snacks. Even if they brought children, they brought nothing. They thought: we can manage at the venue. But even if there was no food, at least water was needed. With only one place distributing water, the crowd rushed, climbing over one another.”

The stampede occurred soon after Vijay began his speech in Karur. (Express photo by Arun Janardhanan)

By 10 am, people began fainting. By the time Vijay spoke, more than a hundred had collapsed. Some were trampled, some broke bones, he writes.

His prose is unblinking here. A doctor at the camp knew acupuncture and homoeopathy, and revived many. Fifty were sent to hospitals. Some to Coimbatore. “Fortunately, there were no deaths,” Murugan writes.

(According to the state government, of the victims in Namakkal, 34 remained in hospital beyond a day, and four for over three days – one of them in critical condition.)

A crowd without control

The police stood outside, instructed not to interfere. Murugan quotes them as saying that crowd management is the party’s job, their role only to prevent riots. Volunteers climbed transformer fences, tore down banners for footholds, screamed Vijay’s name. Pushcart vendors ran away in fear.

“Like being stranded in a desert,” Murugan writes of the thirsty crowd. When asked about toilets, one man said, “Only if we drink water will that problem arise.”

Over a dozen people who sat on a tree branch collapsed on a crowd, worsening the situation further. (Express photo by Arun Janardhanan)

Murugan writes that leaders were nowhere to be seen. The functionaries, instead of managing the chaos, trailed after Vijay, hoping to be noticed. They wanted their faces etched in his memory, so they followed him from the airport, circled his bus, even schemed about what gift might catch his eye.

Murugan writes, “Their whole thought was about registering themselves in Vijay’s mind. So no one came forward to manage the crowd.”

A farce with tragic edges?

The piece captures the exclusivity Vijay maintains even with his own party men, leaving them begging for scraps of attention, while the crowd is left to fend for itself.

“Usually, when political leaders visit a town, they stay for a few hours at the government guest house or a private lodge, meet district functionaries, discuss party and district issues, give guidance, and check on the arrangements. In TVK, it was not so. Neither the district secretary nor other functionaries had any opportunity to meet Vijay. It was only ‘Bussy’ Anand who met them and spoke,” Murugan wrote.

Doctors worked without food or tea till six in the evening at Namakkal. Some patients who regained consciousness asked, “Has Vijay left?” When told he had already come, they ripped out glucose drips and tried to run back into the rally.

The closing note

The blog ends on a sharp edge. The district secretary, Sathish Kumar, has since been booked. His anticipatory bail plea was dismissed.

But Murugan’s piece offers no loud judgment. His sentences carry the plain inevitability of a town overwhelmed. The detail is precise. The tragedy is only a few hours away in Karur, but in Namakkal, it is already written in miniature.

Murugan’s piece reads like a mirror – of fans who arrive at dawn without water, of leaders who seek only to be seen, and of a state learning what it means when cinema becomes politics.

(Murugan is a celebrated Tamil writer known for exploring rural caste dynamics and social realities. In 2014, after his novel, Madhorubhagan, faced violent backlash from caste organisations and Hindutva groups in Namakkal — including book burnings and threats — Murugan was forced to sign an apology and declared “writer Perumal Murugan is dead.” The coordinated campaign, which included threats to his family and public demands for censorship, led to his self-imposed literary silence and temporary exile from his hometown. Only later, a Madras High Court judgment helped restore his creative freedom.)