For over 20 years, Rajini's flirtation with politics has been only for furthering his personal ends, an attitude that ensures that he will now stay in resonance with the larger BJP agenda.
The demise of Jayalalitha in late 2016 and the subsequent incapacitation of Karunanidhi shortly afterwards, generated considerable political churn in Tamil Nadu, which for over 4 decades has had a fairly stable bipolar polity. With the ruling ADMK splitting into 3 factions, and court proceedings commencing against multiple MLAs, it looked like the TN government might fall anytime.
At that juncture, one of the many interesting developments was that Rajnikanth started to re-kindle smoke about his touted political entry, an aspect that has lingered since the 1990s. After months of teasers, in December 2017, Rajni officially announced that he will enter politics and contest the forthcoming assembly polls, whenever it is called for, by forming a new party. This kick-started a frenzy and even the minutest of Rajni’s actions started getting primetime coverage in every Tamil news channel ever since.
Soon after, Rajni called for re-organizing his fans associations under the banner ‘Rajni Makkal Mandram’ (Rajni People’s Congress) by appointing new office bearers in all districts. This, he stated, will be a precursor to his envisioned political party, that will purse truthful, honest, and selfless spiritual politics. The heat that Rajni managed to generate forced all the established political players to take note. His appeal also outweighed Kamal Hassan’s by a huge margin (Kamal also entered politics in 2017).
While everything else seemed conducive for Rajni’s political career, the fact that he was perceived to be positively inclined to the BJP government at the centre wasn’t, as the masses of Tamil Nadu have been attuned to a flavour of politics that saw evil in the BJP’s ideological moorings since the early years of the Dravidian movement (the 1930s - till present). Further, he only complicated matters for himself by declaring his intent for spiritual politics, which was seen as a proxy for Hindutva, an agenda seen by many Tamils as a north Indian bluff to renegade their culture. With local BJP leaders endorsing Rajni’s politics and the BJP’s unofficial online army unleashing a wave of pro-Rajni content, the actor’s politics and the BJP’s game started to resonate. Rajni only strengthened these currents through a string of open endorsements or tacit silence for multiple controversial actions by the central government.
To be fair to the guy, in all these years, he has never been critical of any major political party or government, either in the state or in the centre. Even after announcing his political entry, apart from the random laymen-like accusations about politics having become corrupt, he never attacked any politician or party on specifics. In fact, the only time he gave out an unnamed but unambiguously targetted political statement was against a small but rapidly growing Tamil rightwing party called ‘Naam Tamilar Katchi’ (We Tamils Party), which had launched a vitriolic campaign against him since he announced his political entry.
That apart, despite having easily got immense media limelight that any politician would crave for, Rajni did literally nothing to build a political organization. The imminently anticipated collapse of TN government didn’t happen as expected and the government is now on its way to complete its full 5-year term which ends in mid-2021. This was partly due to the astute manoeuvring of the current Chief Minister Edappadi Palanichami (EPS) and partly due to Amit Shah’s meddling with the institutions like CBI to save a numerically strong but spinelessly loyal ally. Meanwhile, Rajni got busy with the multiple movies that he signed up for, as his political venture had literally revived his acting career that was on a downward spiral since 2011. In fact, the evasive attitude that Rajni wore towards serious politicking, made many critics write off his politics as a non-starter.
It was in this context that Rajani skipped the Parliamentary elections in 2019, that handed out a resounding victory to DMK alliance. Notably, the BJP-ADMK combine drew just 1 seat out of 39. Considering Rajni’s goodwill towards BJP, this was clearly bad news for his political aspirations, if at all he genuinely had one. Post the parliamentary election, Rajni’s ideological support for BJP-2.0 became more explicit and he even targeted E.V.Ramasawmy (chief-architect of the Dravidian Movement) by decrying an age-old 1971 political rally that he headed, for blasphemy against Hindu Gods. As DMK is seen as the true inheritor of the Dravidian movement, it was felt that Rajni was smartly opening a dogmatic war-front with DMK by taking it head-on and making room for himself.
Following this, in a few weeks, he restarted discussions with office-bearers of his ‘Rajni Makkal Mandram’ amid a heightened media frenzy. While it looked like he would soon announce his political party and begin serious campaigning, his latest speech sort of halted that comprehensively. For now, Rajni has once again paused the launch of his political party (a.k.a political entry) with a flimsy speech. He made vague declarations and conditioned his political entry to an even vaguer people’s uprising in support of those declarations. Thus, he has ensured that the uncertainty about his political moves remains alive.
Reserving the critique of these declarations to another article, having been a keenly observant political analyst who reads between lines, I wasn’t even mildly surprised by these developments, as I’ve always felt that for Rajni, politics was a mere tool to advance his own ends and nothing more. On that note, I'm also sure that this won't deter the hopes of a majority of his crazy fans and the sophisticatedly placed saffron lobby that sees an ideological pawn in Rajni.
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