Vijay vs Udhayanidhi: Why private lives of leaders fuels Tamil Nadu politics

This is not new in Tamil Nadu politics. The Dravidian movement challenged Brahminical hierarchy, ritual purity, and inherited privilege. It celebrated self-respect marriages, questioned religious orthodoxy, and sought to separate politics from moral policing. Yet, when politics became intensely competitive, one of the quickest ways to attack opponents was making insinuations about their private relationships.

When former CM and Udhayanidhi’s grandfather M Karunanidhi’s personal life became an issue in public life, questions about Rajathi Ammal and Kanimozhi’s birth entered political conversation. Karunanidhi had three wives. His second wife Dayalu Ammal is the mother of Stalin, while Kanimozhi’s mother Rajathi Ammal was Karunanidhi’s third wife.

Karunanidhi’s relationship with Rajathi Ammal was not known to many until Kanimozhi’s birth. In 1968, while serving as a minister, a Congress leader asked Karunanidhi on the Assembly floor: ‘Who is Dharmambal (another name of Rajathi Ammal), the mother of a child who was born in the Madras general hospital?” Karunanidhi had replied: “Kanimozhi en magal, Kanimozhyin thaayar (Kanimozhi is my daughter, she is Kanimozhi’s mother).”

Former Tamil Nadu deputy chief minister Udhayanidhi Stalin waves to supporters after his arrest for remarks against CM Vijay. (PTI)

Karunanidhi’s answer did something unusual. It denied politics the satisfaction of shame. Till that day, only then Chief Minister C N Annadurai knew about his relationship with Rajathi Ammal. “Anna, a hardcore rationalist, supported him. He would never let anyone down,” a close friend and a party colleague of Karunanidhi told The Indian Express in April 2016.

MGR and Jayalalithaa

AIADMK founder M G Ramachandran’s life produced similar contradictions. His public life constantly negotiated the presence of two women who occupied very different emotional spaces in public imagination: his wife Janaki Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa, his political partner and cinematic companion. Tamil society simultaneously accepted, speculated, celebrated, and judged.

When MGR’s body lay in Rajaji Hall after his death in 1987, Jayalalithaa was famously pushed away from the funeral vehicle in one of the most symbolic political photographs. The struggle was about legitimacy as much as it was about succession.

Tamil politics again wandered into the territory of personal relationships in 2009, with Karunanidhi himself triggering a political storm by repeatedly referring to the unmarried Jayalalithaa as “Thirumathi (Mrs)” rather than the customary “Selvi (used for an unmarried woman)”. He insisted he would continue doing so as long as she described his government as a “minority government”. The remark was widely read as a deliberate taunt that touched the long-standing public speculation surrounding Jayalalithaa’s relationship with MGR. Though the AIADMK condemned it as a personal insult, Karunanidhi remained unapologetic.

The episode revealed that even leaders who publicly challenged conservative social norms repeatedly found political advantage in invoking those very norms when confronting rivals. More often, morality became a weapon — drawn when useful, discarded when inconvenient.

How morality became a tool

That is why the latest controversy feels strangely familiar. The names may have changed, but the grammar continues to survive. Yesterday it was Karunanidhi and then MGR. Today it is Vijay.

There is an irony hidden beneath all this. Before British colonial law standardised marriage, armed with the idea of “sin”, the local society itself was far less uniform than present political rhetoric suggests. Historians have documented enormous diversity in kinship, inheritance, partnerships, and household arrangements across regions and communities.

Under the influence of Victorian education, modern India criminalised and regularised many relationships that were earlier accommodated more ambiguously. Public morality gradually became legal morality and political morality followed.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that morality is not an eternal truth descending from heaven but something societies produce, reshape, and deploy. Moral codes often reveal power more than virtue, with the German philosopher reminding us that moral language frequently disguises political weaponisation.

Antonio Gramsci helps explain another layer. The Italian philosopher and Communist distinguished political society, or the institutions of coercion, from civil society, or the institutions through which consent is manufactured. In Tamil Nadu, which may be politically modern but remains socially feudal, the feudal logic is reproduced in the political arena too. Almost all the movies of Annadurai were either against feudalism or superstition. While the zamindari system may be gone, the culture and language it produced endure.

The controversy surrounding Udhayanidhi’s derogatory comment thus belongs to a much older political tradition in which morality itself becomes an instrument of power. The accusation is rarely about private conduct alone and is more about delegitimising a rival. If the public begins doubting someone’s moral standing, political legitimacy becomes easier to attack.