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Sangeetha filed for divorce at Chengalpattu Family Court. That's her private decision. About her marriage. Her life.
TVK supporters responded by circulating obscene and derogatory content about her on social media. AIDWA had to put out a statement calling it digital violence against women.
I need you to sit with that for a moment. A woman files for divorce — completely legal, entirely her own business — and the political supporters of the party her husband founded decide to punish her for it publicly, with obscene content, en masse, online.
Tell me how this is different from what BJP's online machinery does.
I've been writing about Vijay's political trajectory for two years now. I said in the first post that the chinna koothiyans were going to be a problem. I said the core fans were going to function as a mob, not as a constituency. I didn't think I'd have a news article confirming it quite this specifically before the election.
The BJP-RSS online ecosystem operates on a very specific logic: the leader is beyond criticism, dissent is betrayal, anyone who threatens the image of the leader must be attacked. It doesn't matter if the criticism is legitimate. It doesn't matter if the person is a private citizen. The emotional response is the same — a coordinated pile-on, abuse, dehumanisation. It's a feature, not a bug. It keeps potential critics afraid to speak.
Vijay's fan base, at least the loudest and most visible part of it, is now running the same logic. You question Vijay, you get abuse. You report on something inconvenient, you get abuse. His own wife exercises a legal right in a family court, and she gets obscene content spread about her publicly because that's what you do to people who disturb the image.
I voted against BJP because I thought their political culture — the mob protection of the leader, the intolerance of dissent, the hostility toward any kind of reality check — was dangerous to democratic norms. I was right about that.
So what do I do with a party whose supporters are running the same culture?
The comparison to BJP will make Vijay fans angry. I know. That's almost proof of the point.
The thing is, I'm not saying Vijay is Modi. I'm not saying TVK's ideology is the same as BJP's. TVK hasn't been in power, hasn't passed laws, hasn't done the things BJP has done. The policy content is different. On paper, at least.
But political culture is not just about policy. It's about how the movement treats dissent. It's about what the supporters do when they feel threatened. And on that measure — on the behavioural measure — what I'm seeing from the TVK mob online is identical to the Sangh ecosystem. Leader as an untouchable symbol. Critics as enemies. Women who become inconvenient as targets.
A secular, progressive political movement cannot claim to be an alternative to fascist political culture while its online base is doing fascist political culture. That's not how it works. You don't get credit for the ideology on paper when the behaviour on the ground looks like this.
The election is next month. I genuinely don't know what I want to happen.
I don't want TVK to get enough seats to matter without Vijay having to reckon with what his fan base has become. A comfortable small win — eight seats, ten seats, the "well he tried" number — means this whole ecosystem continues, slightly emboldened, without any accountability. And the fans will stay exactly as they are because nothing punished them.
But a bigger win is worse. A bigger win means this mob gets a sense of political efficacy. It means the lesson is that the abuse worked, that protecting the image by attacking anyone who threatens it is a viable and rewarded political strategy.
Vijay has not said anything about what his supporters did to his wife. Not publicly. I checked. He could have. He has a platform. He made a choice.
That's the kind of thing that tells you who someone is when it actually matters.
I said in the first post in this series that the question is whether a highly curated lovable public persona can bypass democratic scrutiny. I think the answer, watching this play out, is: yes, and the fans become the mechanism by which it bypasses scrutiny. You don't need to be above criticism if your supporters make criticism too costly for most people to bother with.
MGR built a political machine on mass love. Vijay's lot are building one on mass love plus the threat of what happens if you publicly step out of line.
That's not progress. That's not secular. That's not a new politics.
That's just the same old poison with a different face on the bottle.