Tamil Nadu: A New Cast, the Same Play

Cabinet reshuffles are rarely about governance. They are about managing sight lines. Who the public sees, who it forgets, and who continues to pull the strings backstage, away from the unseemly noise of newsprint and social media indignation.

When V. Senthil Balaji and K. Ponmudy tendered their resignations last week—quietly, with the air of men complying with a script rather than confronting their own downfalls—it was immediately understood by anyone familiar with the state’s political choreography that this was not a purge. It was a rearrangement of surfaces, a controlled burn to protect the core. After all, it was long overdue.

Senthil Balaji, once the grinning mascot of DMK’s hinterland mobilisations, had become too hot to hold after months of clinging to office despite a thicket of legal cases, arrests, and asset seizures. His past had returned with alarming vividness: the cash-for-jobs scandal from his AIADMK years, the shadowy tentacles of the ?1,000-crore TASMAC liquor scam, and the growing sense that even in a state desensitised to the fungibility of morality, he was an embarrassment too large to tuck away. The Supreme Court had, in effect, left no option: he could either remain a minister or remain out of jail. Not both.

K. Ponmudy’s exit, meanwhile, was just as well-deserved. At an event, the 73-year-old minister linked the Shaivite and Vaishnavite religious tilaks to sexual positions and spoke of women in crude terms, sparking widespread outrage across the political spectrum, including condemnation from within his own party. DMK MP Kanimozhi publicly labeled the remarks as “unacceptable” and the party removed Ponmudy from his position as Deputy General Secretary. The Madras High Court, taking suo motu cognizance, directed the police to file an FIR against him for hate speech, warning of contempt proceedings if the directive was not followed.

This incident added to the growing list of controversies within the DMK’s ranks. PTR Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, the articulate former Finance Minister now reassigned to the IT portfolio, recently expressed public dissatisfaction over his diminished role in the cabinet. His candid remarks, though veiled in eloquence, revealed underlying tensions within the party’s hierarchy. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin responded with a warning, advising PTR to exercise restraint and reminding him that while eloquence is valuable, it must be tempered with discretion in governance.

And yet, nobody truly believes Balaji and Ponmudy have been retired from the DMK’s bloodstream. According to reports, and to the logic of Tamil Nadu’s realpolitik, both men will continue to serve as critical behind-the-scenes operators, political antennae in the rougher terrains where elections are decided not by policy manifestos but by whispered networks of caste, liquor, and patronage. Their resignations are therefore a trick of perspective: withdrawing them from the high balcony where they were too exposed, and seating them instead in the pit where deals are struck and victories scripted. “Ponmudy was always going to be a problem. He forgot the number one rule: you don’t offend everyone at once,” says a party source, adding that Balaji was “irreplaceable”.

This sleight of hand is not happening in a vacuum. Stalin’s political radar is humming with new threats.

The AIADMK and BJP, whose alliance he might once have dismissed as a forced marriage of convenience, are slowly congealing into a more durable adversary. After a bitter public divorce in 2023, they have returned to each other, driven by mutual existential need. Edappadi K. Palaniswami’s leadership of the NDA bloc in Tamil Nadu has been confirmed by Amit Shah, signalling that the BJP will, for now, content itself with playing junior partner if it means giving the DMK a harder fight.

The numbers still favour Stalin—for now. CVoter surveys place him as the most preferred Chief Minister at 27%. But the emergence of Vijay as a plausible alternative, commanding 18% support without the grind of governance behind him, reveals a hunger for freshness that should unsettle even a skilled tactician like Stalin. Add to this the quiet frustration among some sections of the middle class with dynastic entrenchment—with Udhayanidhi Stalin’s upward trajectory too naked to ignore—and the once-towering DMK advantage begins to look a little vulnerable at the edges.

Cracks are showing beneath the surface of his governance. Friction within the DMK-led alliance recently spilled into the open when the CPM accused the government of running an “undeclared emergency” — after police allegedly blocked permission for a party rally in Villupuram. The response from DMK’s senior ranks was not measured: A. Raja accused the communists of selfishness and hinted at corruption, detonating a public spat that embarrassed the coalition just when it could least afford it. Behind the angry statements is a deeper unease — that Stalin’s velvet touch is giving way to a harder, more exclusionary style of rule, one that even allies feel shut out from.

The more serious indictment, however, lies in the ground realities that even DMK loyalists cannot spin away. A series of hooch tragedies in Villupuram and Kallakurichi, where dozens died from consuming illicit liquor, exposed the state’s continued failure to dismantle entrenched criminal economies. The high-profile murder of BSP leader K. Armstrong in Chennai fed into a growing perception that law and order is slipping — or, worse, being selectively enforced. Add to this the uneasy handling of protests, the whispered resentments within the alliance, and the DMK’s self-image of competent modernism starts to look more like a well-maintained illusion, increasingly vulnerable to disruption.

In this context, the recent cabinet reshuffle feels less like an act of strength and more like a desperate maintenance of the DMK’s “immaculate” exterior. Stalin has redistributed portfolios with mechanical precision: S.S. Sivasankar taking over Electricity, S. Muthusamy handling Prohibition and Excise, R.S. Rajakannappan holding Forests and Khadi, and T. Mano Thangaraj, a known loyalist, making a tidy comeback into ministerial ranks. None of the names set pulses racing. But then, that was the point. Stability was the message; not renewal, not vision, certainly not upheaval.

What goes unsaid is that real reform—the kind that would require confronting systemic rot, rethinking caste arithmetic, rebalancing the patronage economy—is not on the menu. To rip out the old roots would be to court instability, and instability is Stalin’s true enemy in the year before a general election. Better to trim the shrubbery and call it gardening.

There is a deeper irony here. Stalin has spent much of his career positioning himself as a quieter, more technocratic successor to his father’s boisterous populism. He does not boom rhetoric from balconies or pick fights with adversaries. And yet, he has increasingly found himself resorting to the oldest tricks in the Tamil political playbook: exile the troublesome, elevate the loyal, choreograph the optics. In trying to appear invulnerable, Stalin reveals his awareness of just how precarious his dominance has become.

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