Vijay’s ‘river of obscenity’ barb to slam DMK, Udhayanidhi’s ‘reels’ counter

For much of his speech, Vijay travelled backwards – through Enforcement Directorate documents, the Sarkaria Commission, the Veeranam project, MISA, M Karunanidhi, M G Ramachandran and even poet Kannadasan – to make an argument he has returned to repeatedly since taking office: that corruption was not incidental to the previous DMK establishment but embedded in its political machinery.

Leader of the Opposition (LoP) Udhayanidhi Stalin’s response later was almost the inverse. Tamil Nadu, he argued, had elected Vijay to govern the present, not to conduct a guided tour of 1970.

The exchange produced tumult inside the House and a larger political question outside it: how long can the corruption history of the DMK remain politically renewable when the party returned to power repeatedly after those controversies.

And how long can Vijay rely on exposing that past before voters begin demanding an account primarily of his own government?

CM slams derogatory language

But Vijay began with another subject that has increasingly shadowed Tamil Nadu politics: the language in which politicians speak about one another. “A river of obscenity and a river of hatred have been flowing through Tamil Nadu,” he said, referring to ‘defamatory and vulgar remarks about women, the double entendres and the triple entendres’.

Politicians could criticise one another as harshly as they wished, Vijay said, but ‘there is no need to personally demean our people, our women or anyone else, or to speak in a degrading manner’.

The reference was unmistakably connected to recent controversies involving Opposition speeches, though Vijay presented it as ‘a general appeal to everyone’. He also invoked the humiliation Jayalalithaa had faced as a woman in Tamil Nadu politics and said his government was determined that ‘nothing of that kind should happen to any woman in the future’.

Vijay had earlier said files concerning three departments were on his table. When the Opposition demanded that he open them immediately, he said Monday: “Before opening those, shall we look at a small sample?”

The sample was nearly half a century old.

Citing the Sarkaria Commission’s examination of the Veeranam project, Vijay referred to allegations surrounding a contract worth more than Rs 16 crore awarded to Sathyanarayana Brothers during the DMK government of the 1970s. He said the Commission record referred to an alleged 2.5% commission and payments amounting to Rs 29 lakh between 1970 and 1974.

He repeatedly stressed that these were not fresh allegations made by his government. “These are not allegations made by us,” Vijay said. “These are allegations contained in that report and in the document sent by the ED.”

Political performance

Still, the performance was unmistakably political. When referring to the alleged Rs 29 lakh paid in seven instalments, Vijay observed that the money had apparently arrived ‘as though paying the EMI on a loan’.

He then moved decades forward to ED material concerning the previous DMK government, quoting allegations that contractors had been compelled to pay between 7.5 and 10% under the description of ‘party fund’. He cited the agency’s allegations involving then Municipal Administration and Water Supply Department and former minister V Senthil Balaji’s tenure overseeing TASMAC.

The CM lingered particularly on phrases used in the ED material – ‘dishonest intention’, ‘unauthorised power broker’, ‘organised crime syndicate’ – occasionally reading them with the delighted disbelief of someone discovering unusually helpful dialogue already written for him. When the document referred to political figures around Coimbatore and Karur, Vijay called it the ‘Karur gang’.

And when it described excess amounts of Rs 10 to Rs 100 being collected from liquor customers ‘in an organised manner’, Vijay supplied the punchline: “Even the wrongdoing was carried out properly, systematically and correctly. Have any of you heard of scientific corruption? This is it.”

Govt’s ‘problem point’

The problem for the government is that allegations, agency documents and findings are not interchangeable.

Many of the matters Vijay cited remain disputed, under investigation or before courts.

The Sarkaria Commission itself belongs to a political history Tamil Nadu has already voted through several times: after the controversies of the 1970s, the DMK returned to power in 1989, 1996, 2006 and 2021.

Vijay framed corruption less as an isolated prosecution than as an inherited political culture.

Whenever TVK members mentioned corruption, he said, DMK legislators demanded evidence. “But they never say one thing,” Vijay said. “To this day, they have never said, ‘We have never committed corruption’.”

The DMK benches erupted repeatedly. Members raised slogans, and surrounded the Speaker. Some sat on the floor. At one point, in an almost absurdly gentle interruption to an otherwise hostile morning, Vijay helped DMK MLA Durai Chandrasekar get back on his feet.

LoP lashes out

Outside the House, Udhayanidhi attacked both the substance and choreography.

The Chief Minister, he said, had ignored questions about current law and order and instead “went back to 1970”. “He sat for three days, mugged up something written and given to him by somebody, came here and vomited it out,” Udhayanidhi said. He characterised Vijay’s address as “the same punch dialogues, the same cinema dialogues and the same acting”, alleging that it had been delivered “solely for reels.”

More significantly, Udhayanidhi challenged the evidentiary weight Vijay attached to the accusations.

The stakes explain some of the caution beneath the aggression in Udhayanidhi’s reactions too. “All of those are merely allegations. Nothing has been proved. The investigation is continuing,” he said of the ED material.

He also turned the corruption argument against the government, citing cases involving people subsequently admitted into TVK and alleging conflicts around Vijay’s advisers and mining operations. On those allegations too, Udhayanidhi said he would release evidence separately.

As Monday’s Assembly became something more than a fight over who stole what and when, Vijay was trying to make the DMK’s past present again. Udhayanidhi was trying to force Vijay back into the present.

The CM Vijay’s method was cinematic, repetitive and often funny by design. But underneath the performance was a calculated proposition: that a new government without a political past can define itself by excavating the past of those it defeated. Udhayanidhi’s answer was equally simple: history has already had elections.