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Superstar Rajinikanth’s entry into politics is a twenty-five-year-long soap opera to beat all “mega serials” on the telly. He’s finally there, well almost. He has promised to formally launch a new political party in January 2021 and upend “everything” with a brand of politics he describes as “spiritual”. It’s “now or never”. Other than that, we know little else — of his friends and foes, policies, political outlook or whether he would indeed be his party’s chief ministerial candidate. The two key lieutenants he has unveiled have neither any political experience nor personal equity.
Details don’t really matter in a Rajinikanth flick. If in the course of a four-minute song, a penniless Rajini can become a billionaire businessman, surely, he can storm into power with a brand-new political party formed barely a few months before the election.
At 70, Rajinikanth is not the oldest to start a new political party. C. Rajagopalachari was 81 when the Swatantra party was founded in 1959. But Rajaji who by then, in the long course of his public life, had the experience of running a municipality to being the governor general of independent India, was a sort of spiritual head of the Swatantra Party. And going by historical accounts, Rajaji was in much better physical health in 1959 than Rajini in 2020.
Even if we buy the argument for a minute that Rajinikanth will be a gamechanger, what is the game he would change remains fuzzy. And is there any room for a third party in the firmly bipolar polity of Tamil Nadu? Going by Rajinikanth’s rhetoric in the run up to his political plunge, his principal adversary seems to be the DMK. But the slogan of “change” would fall flat if he cuts any electoral deal with the ruling AIADMK.
Is he a Trojan horse, as many suspect, for the BJP to increase its footprint in the State? Barring a miracle, which Rajinikanth says will occur, the ‘Superstar’ of cinema might end up being the ‘Powerstar’ (an unfunny Tamil film comedian who goes by that moniker) of politics.
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