'Stalin's intention is plain and simple.'
'The DMK wants to convert what is an 'incumbency-centred' election for the party-led alliance into one more 'Modi/BJP election' after Stalin's successive success in 2019 and 2021, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
In the Bihar assembly poll campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's unverified innuendo that local workers were being harassed in distant Tamil Nadu can lose the ruling Janata Dal-United-led Bharatiya Janata Party-National Democratic Alliance more votes than gain any.
The fact speaks for itself. Tens of thousands of migrant workers from North India, including Bihar, who are based in Tamil Nadu for two decades and more, know the truth.
And it does not uphold Modi's claims/charges against Tamil Nadu's ruling DMK partner in the Congress-led Opposition INDIA combine at the national level.
In fact, the BJP had tried this trick once earlier before elections 2019, when a section of social media showed 'Bihari migrant labour' being thrashed by their Tamil colleagues in some factory.
The BJP went to town on the issue, again at the national-level.
After the TN police's cyber-crime wing arrested a BJP functionary from Bihar on the charge of faking and circulating the same at the national level, the man apologised and the case was supposedly dropped.
This time round, even no such video exploded on anyone's face, yet the prime minister of India, who supposedly has access to all information and intelligence inputs from across the country, said what he said, obviously without verification, and hence substantiation.
Conversely, the Bihari workers in Tamil Nadu would have conveyed their impressions of the 'friendly' people and government in the state, to their families and friends back home, especially after the PM's comments.
It includes, among other things, the state government facilitating Hindi-medium classes in Chennai's suburban localities and other industrial areas, for the benefit of North Indian children. This is in a state that is supposedly opposed to Hindi, rather 'Hindi imposition'.
The danger for the BJP-NDA in Bihar is that these migrant workers' impressions can influence their families, if especially there are localised debates on what Modi had said.
By extension, a section of Bihari voters might conclude that if the prime minister's claims and charges of the kind cannot be trusted on one issue, can he be trusted on other issues.
Even without it, there are questions about the continued marketability of the Modi-Nitish duo's constant reference to rival Lalu Yadav's 'Jungle Raj'.
Be that as it may, the Yadav family was last in power in Bihar way back in 2005.
Yet, they have also sustained their politico-electoral momentum against a ruling dispensation that has been going after the ailing patriarch on multiple corruption cases going back to his abruptly ended last term in office, way back in 1997. Many voters would have been born later.
Hence, first-time voters in the state have had no personal experience about what they are being told, that too in a no-holds barred election campaign.
It may be true of other young voters, who had cast their first vote, only in the Lok Sabha polls last year. At the time, Lalu Prasad and 'Jungle Raj' were not election issues.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin has since promptly joined issue with Modi and said that the PM was 'inciting enmity and hatred' between 'the people of the two states'.
Referring to Governor R N Ravi in context without naming him, DMK Deputy General Secretary and Stalin's sister Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, MP, said that 'barring one person in the Chennai Raj Bhavan, all others from that state were happy in TN'. Other anti-BJP party leaders in the state too lost no time in joining issues with Modi.
Yes, senior state BJP leaders, including unit president Nainar Nagendran, defended the PM by attacking the DMK on this score, but they all sounded unconvincing, incoherent and worse.
At the same time, in industrial cities like Chennai, Coimbatore, Tiruppur and Madurai, businessmen are tense over the PM's avoidable observations having a negative impact on the morale of their workforce. Many, if not, most of them are from Bihar and other states in the region.
But workers from across the Vindhyas are in substantial numbers, and what Modi said about Bihari labour in Tamil Nadu is applicable equally to others, too -- if only true and proven.
Yet, there is no denying the unthinking, uncharitable and avoidable innuendo heaped on Bihari migrant labour in TN by DMK leaders K N Nehru and Dayanidhi Maran.
It was learnt that in each one of these cases, Stalin ticked them off, but no public apologies were rendered nor any FIR filed -- as the BJP/AIADMK Opposition did not move the courts.
But the fact remains that not in any one of these occasions was there physical or verbal attacks on migrant labour, starting with Bihar workers, anywhere in the state.
True to form, even the AIADMK did not make it a huge issue. Neither did the BJP.
Stalin has since publicly dared Modi to make such a statement from Tamil soil. His intention is plain and simple.
The DMK wants to convert what ordinarily is an 'incumbency-centred' election for the party-led alliance, into one more 'Modi/BJP election' after Stalin's successive success in 2019 and 2021.
The rival AIADMK under the late chief minister Jayalalithaa, swept Modi's maiden national elections in 2014.
By sustaining pressure on the BJP on Hindutva and 'anti-federal' policies since, Stalin, even while taking away the bugle from Jaya's AIADMK, has been able to convince TN voters on their otherwise common anti-Modi, hence anti-BJP agenda.
That is to say, Modi may have unwittingly updated Stalin's fading poll strategy, which was seemingly beginning to lose electoral charm for the 30-plus per cent of non-committed swing voters in the state.
Just now, the focus of elections 2026 is showing signs of becoming Vijay-centric, post-Karur stampede, more than earlier. That is not good news for the DMK.
At the maiden meeting of the expanded executive council of Vijay's Tamilagan Vettri Kalagam, the party reiterated that he would be its chief minister candidate and that the poll battle was only between the DMK and the TVK (and all others, including the AIADMK-NDA would be bystanders).
This one reiteration has put paid to perceived hopes of the AIADMK separately and the NDA otherwise of building a stronger alliance that would sure enough defeat the DMK-led alliance. This implies that the constituents of the NDA are not as confident about victory minus the TVK.
How such reiteration impacts the CBI probe into the Karur stampede case is being freely debated in Tamil social media, since. It needs to be remembered that the TVK meeting also gave all powers to Vijay for strategising for the assembly poll -- a slight opening for a TVK re-think on forming a pre-poll alliance with stronger parties than any weakling.
Minus a strong alliance no one is expecting Vijay's TVK or an alliance led by the infant party to capture power.
But there is apprehension that a good performance by any Vijay-led electoral arrangement could lead to a 'hung assembly', wherein the odds would still be heavily weighed against the DMK.
First and foremost, the rivals would dub it as the voter's rejection of the DMK.
If the DMK combine still formed a government in a hung assembly, Stalin would be remembered for becoming the first Dravidian party boss to give into pre-poll demands for a coalition government, post-poll.
The same applies to the AIADMK's former chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, who is being projected as the candidate of the BJP-NDA combine.
Political stability in the post-poll scenario would be under constant pressure. In turn, this could lead to a well-endowed and resource-rich BJP entering the scene in a bigger way than in any pre-poll scenario.
Closer to the election, a whisper campaign could be expected on the need to vote for a 'stable government' -- and, hence the DMK, wholesale.
In 2006, when the DMK's late patriarch, M Karunanidhi, headed a minority party government with outside support from the Congress leader of the UPA combine at the national level, the combo worked wonderfully. Karunanidhi completed his five-year term without any signs or episodes of instability.
The prevailing situation may not be favourable for another attempt of the kind -- especially in a hung assembly, where the Congress ally's national reach and outreach would be not how they were in circa 2006.
Yes, Vijay may then have a key role in an anti-DMK coalition of the willing. It could include the BJP which, after his long post-stampeded silence, he continues to dub as the TVK's 'ideological enemy'.
If so, it could kickstart a new political future for him. In the pre-stampede scenario, whisper campaigns, supposedly based on opinion polls, put Vijay ahead of the DMK's Udhayanidhi Stalin, and the state BJP's currently estranged former party boss, K Annamalai -- and in another assembly elections, five years hence.
Such theories were based on the fact that by the next assembly elections in 2031, Stalin would have turned 77 and EPS, 76 -- and both parties would anyway have to look around for a new-generation leadership.
However, without a share in power post-poll next year, with the attendant political presence for the five years that followed, Vijay and TVK might lack the ubiquitous staying power -- which is not only about money power.
In context, reference is being made to the NTK's actor-politician Seeman, who has stayed afloat, and has continued with his state-wide campaign after losing every election for the past decade and more, but with a noticeable increase in vote-share.
Vijay would have to emulate Seeman in the process if he has to stay relevant for another five years, but even before the Karur tragedy, he showed himself as a recluse, who was insular and inaccessible even to the handful of his second-line leaders.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff