Vijay government at 100 days: An old state, a new ruler, and pros and cons of inexperience

At the government’s 50-day mark, a senior officer described TVK as almost like “a new government after Independence” – full of energy, with almost total ignorance. Ministers and MLAs who had never attended government review meetings, studied policy documents or navigated the Secretariat had, in effect, walked into Fort St George one morning and discovered the state.

Their ignorance has been both a handicap and an advantage. The most striking example is corruption. Senior officials across departments say visible corruption has declined – although nobody confidently predicts how long that will last.

“Corruption also requires skills,” a senior government secretary said. “You need the language to ask and demand money. You need the resources and logistics to receive and park the money. Those who have been looting earlier will not go and tell the new custodians about how to do it. You need to acquire your own skills and means to do it.”

If the present decline is merely the “starting trouble” of the new regime, the officer added, acquiring those skills could take a minimum “six to 12 months”. Behind this sharp humour lies a serious change.

Tamil Nadu’s established parties inherited not merely individuals capable of corruption but systems capable of organising it. The familiar “party fund” – thousands of crores allegedly accumulated during a government’s tenure – had become part of political machinery. The TVK arrived without such machinery.

Officials say officers now think twice before demanding or accepting money because their ministers are not demanding a share. Some notoriously valuable postings, such as electricity board transfers, have been moved towards counselling and online systems, potentially breaking the cycle in which officials pay politicians for postings and subsequently recover that investment below. Police officers also face less pressure from local political satraps.

Whether any of this survives is another matter. Ministers have interests and ambitions too. A WhatsApp number for corruption complaints must still police roughly 10 lakh government employees through substantially the same small state vigilance and anti-corruption apparatus.

Advantage bureaucrats

For now, bureaucrats have another advantage: they know the state better than their ministers do. No political executive in the government yet possesses the institutional experience routinely required to challenge a sophisticated departmental proposal. Top officials acknowledge ministers complaining about officers and officers complaining about ministers to the Chief Minister.

Yet, Vijay has occasionally unsettled bureaucratic habits precisely because he does not understand why they became habits. On contentious issues, for example, going to court – and allowing a matter to become sub-judice – has long offered governments a convenient refuge. Vijay has begun asking: Why court immediately? Why not talk first? His proposal for direct talks with Karnataka over Cauvery was one example even though it failed.

The more consequential test concerns Vijay’s highly visible, event-driven governance: his surprise visit to a Dalit hostel in Chennai, and to the Egmore children’s hospital, where he himself was born, when a crisis commands attention. A Chief Minister arriving produces instant government: officials assemble, inspections happen, instructions are issued, somebody may be punished.

But did the system change after Vijay left? Does the Chief Minister now have a dashboard showing the operational status of every Dalit hostel in Tamil Nadu – when each was last inspected, whether kitchens and drinking water meet safety standards, what deficiencies were found, how many complaints remain unresolved and whether corrective orders were actually carried out? The real test of the Saidapet visit is not what happened in that hostel after the Chief Minister walked in, but whether the state learned enough from one visible failure to detect the next one before a Chief Minister has to visit it.

A hostel scandal should result not merely in action at that hostel but inspections and measurable standards across hostels. A hospital visit should expose statewide data on beds, staffing, waiting times and failures. Otherwise the government becomes a sequence of well-photographed emergencies.

The state must eventually learn to see before the Chief Minister arrives. There are signs that visibility itself is altering another institution. Assembly proceedings are now broadcast live, including Question Hour, arguments and the nuanced exchanges previously experienced largely through edited clips and newspaper reports. With Vijay’s enormous existing audience, more people may now be watching Tamil Nadu politics itself.

A former DMK minister said Opposition parties may consequently become more cautious too, about boycotts and walkouts hereafter: “voters can now watch what happened before somebody left the House”.

However, visibility is also Vijay’s greatest vulnerability. Unlike the DMK and AIADMK, he carries virtually no governing past. On Cauvery, Sri Lankan Tamils, fishermen or custodial deaths and serial murders, opponents cannot readily ask what Vijay did when he governed 10 years earlier. His political biography exists almost entirely in the present tense.

That gives him an extraordinary moral upper hand – and makes every failure potentially more expensive. A corruption audio leak from Vijay’s government could damage him far more severely than an equivalent scandal involving an older party because Vijay’s political proposition was precisely that he was not them.

The spotlight that helped him capture power can magnify what happens under it.

His government has meanwhile accumulated conventional achievements: free-power concessions, women’s-safety and anti-narcotics initiatives, closure of 717 TASMAC shops near educational institutions and places of worship, crop-loan relief and welfare promises. Its first Budget claimed to incorporate 125 manifesto commitments. Tamil Nadu has also announced investment commitments exceeding Rs 1 lakh crore in the government’s first 100 days.

But finances impose less glamorous limits. Government employees are already questioning the Old Pension Scheme promise. Several older schemes continue, some under new names. Much of the administrative machine, officials concede, simply runs as before.

The darker marks have been political. Accusations of horse-trading and efforts involving AIADMK MLAs, following cases and arrests over alleged DMK attempts to poach TVK MLAs. A party promising a new political culture appeared remarkably quick to discover an old one.

A prominent expert in Dravidian politics, requesting not to drag his name into a political write up, invoked Stuart Hall’s preference for a politics “without guarantees”.

Tamil Nadu’s history is littered with guarantees that collided with governing reality – from the DMK’s famous subsidised rice promise after 1967 to repeated promises of prohibition. Vijay ultimately faces the same problem. “Change” cannot itself become another warranty card. And 100 days, the academic noted, is partly a marketing invention rather like modern films celebrating even a successful first week.

Perhaps the most revealing assessment therefore came from a senior official who regularly interacts with the Chief Minister. “His aim was to become a CM,” the official said. “We do not know what he is up to now after achieving that dream.”

For 100 days, Vijay has been discovering the state. The more important question is whether, once the novelty wears off, the state will discover anything fundamentally different about itself.