Rajinikanth’s reluctance to follow through on his promises make it hard to take him seriously

Feverish anticipation, large crowds and ear-splitting firecrackers. Rajinikanth’s press conference in Chennai on March 12 was not unlike the theatrical release of his films.

Unfortunately for his fans, the similarities did not end there. Like his latest film, Darbar, Rajinikanth’s speech flattered to deceive.

His fiery tone, trademark gesticulations and lectern-thumping all added up to this: he was not going to be his non-existent party’s chief ministerial face in the Tamil Nadu assembly polls in 2021, and, what’s worse, he wouldn’t say when this party would be launched.


While his supporters may feel let down and the state’s two major parties — the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) — somewhat relieved, Rajinikanth’s speech was hardly a surprise.

His inability to take the plunge, although he often says he will, and his inconsistent political stances are signs that he might end up being little more than a minor distraction off-screen.

Rajinikanth has been mulling his entry into politics for so long — 24 years, to be precise — that there is a growing sense of fatigue in Tamil Nadu with his declarations.

In December 2017, he said he would formally enter politics and contest the next assembly election in the state. He has since done little to back that up. His acting peer Kamal Hassan, meanwhile, floated a party and fought the 2019 general election, garnering 3.8% of the total votes.

Both Rajinikanth, 69, and Hassan, 65, have been looking to capitalise on the void left by the passing of AIADMK’s J Jayalalithaa and DMK’s M Karunanidhi in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Tamil Nadu’s voters had not looked beyond these two leaders to choose their chief minister for almost three decades.

Many believed Rajinikanth, through an alliance with Hassan, would stand between Karunanidhi’s son MK Stalin and the chief minister’s chair. Some even thought Rajinikanth had a shot at the throne himself. He was the unknown quantity that made electoral calculations difficult.

But Rajinikanth has now made it clear that he is not looking to occupy it. How many of his ardent supporters will now vote for his party, if at all he does start one? His party’s appeal as an alternative to the DMK and the AIADMK will be vastly diminished — at least to his admirers — without him as the chief ministerial contender.

TKS Elangovan, a DMK member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, says his party wants to ignore him and focus on taking the fight to the AIADMK. That might not be so hard now. The other factor working in the DMK’s favour might be the perception that Rajinikanth’s politics is of the soft Hindutva kind. This in a state which, thanks to its Dravidian legacy, has managed to keep religion at bay in electoral politics, which is the primary reason the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) remains a marginal player in the state.

Rajinikanth has made no bones about his religiosity or his admiration for the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah, whom he compared to Krishna and Arjun in August 2019, after the revocation of Jammu & Kashmir’s special status. His proximity to right wing ideologues such as the late Cho Ramaswamy and S Gurumurthy has only pushed him closer to the BJP in people’s minds.

But he has tried to distance himself from the BJP, saying in November 2019 that there was an attempt to saffronise him. He also slammed the Union home ministry for its intelligence failure in preventing the recent riots in the Capital.

Furthermore, while he has backed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Population Register, he has not taken a stand on the National Register of Citizens. Interestingly, the AIADMK government in Tamil Nadu on March 12 decided to put its NPR exercise on hold, despite the AIADMK being an ally of the BJP.

The BJP has been hoping to piggyback on Rajinikanth to change its fortunes in Tamil Nadu. Rajinikanth seems to want to reciprocate, except he is not sure how far he can go. “He has sensed the anti-BJP sentiment in the state and realised he can’t openly support the BJP,” says S. Anandhi, professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies.

But there are some who see no contradictions in Rajinikanth’s approach to the BJP.

“His support is issue-based. He strongly believes there is no threat to Indian Muslims from the CAA. At the same time, he said it was the home ministry’s responsibility to protect people during the Delhi riots,” says R Rangaraj Pandey, founder and chief executive of Chanakyaa, a digital news channel. But the question is, will voters see these nuances when his opponents paint him as being sympathetic to the BJP? In the run-up to the first assembly election without Jayalithaa and Karunanidhi, due May next year, neither Stalin nor chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami can take things for granted. They will closely watch Rajinikanth’s moves over the coming months. But for him to pose a challenge to those two, he has to clearly define his political positions and reconsider his aversion to being a chief ministerial candidate.

But even that wouldn’t amount to much unless he launched his party soon. Half-hearted contenders have little space in Indian politics.