8 minutes reading time
I spent an hour yesterday reading through the transcript of a speech delivered in the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly.
It was G.V. Markandayan, the DMK member from Vilathikulam, speaking on the budget floor. If you haven't watched assembly proceedings in this state, you are missing out on some of the finest surrealist comedy produced anywhere on the subcontinent.
Anyway, in the transcript, i saw something.
I had to pause myself from skimming through the transcript, open a real video on youtube and see for myself.
Markandayan stood up, adjusted his microphone, and began the obligatory ritualistic tribute that every party backbencher must perform before they are permitted to speak about water pipes or bus routes.
First, homage to Karunanidhi on his memorial day. Then a nod to Periyar, Ambedkar, and Rajendra Prasad. Then a salute to the youth icon Udhayanidhi Stalin reciting Bharathiyar lines about fearlessness, followed by a warm bow to K.N. Nehru, Kanimozhi, and half the front bench. Standard assembly grease. You expect that. It is the cost of doing business in a patronage democracy.
Then, out of nowhere, he decided to travel to 1945 London.
He began explaining World War II to the Tamil Nadu assembly. He told the floor that when Adolf Hitler was about to destroy human civilization, Winston Churchill declared war and brought peace to the world. Then he claimed that after the 1945 elections, when Clement Attlee defeated Churchill, reporters rushed to Attlee and asked him how it felt to defeat such a titanic hero.
And according to Markandayan, Attlee humbly told the press:
"நான் ஜனநாயகத்தில் நடந்த தேர்தலில் வெற்றிபெற்ற சாதாரண மனிதன். சர்ச்சில் ஒரு மகா புருஷர், அந்த வகையில் தெய்வத்திற்கு ஒப்பாகக்கூடிய மாபெரும் தலைவன் சர்சில். அவருடைய சாதனையை தேர்தலில் வெற்றி பெற்ற நான் எந்த இடத்திலும் வெற்றி பெற முடியாது..."
("I am merely an ordinary man who won an election in a democracy. Churchill is a maha purushan, a great man comparable to God. Even after winning the election, I could never match his achievements anywhere...")
Right after delivering this little fable, Markandayan leaned into the microphone, raised his voice to a theatrical crescendo, and made the inevitable pivot:
Just as Attlee looked at Churchill, he proclaimed, the people of India look upon Muthuvel Karunanidhi Stalin as a "maha purushan" and an "avathaara purushan" (an avatar of god itself). He shouted that Stalin doesn't need to be searched for anywhere because he is everywhere: in the atom, in the pillar, in the blade of grass. "Anuvilum iruppaar, thoonilum iruppaar, thurumbilum iruppaar."
The assembly erupted in roars and desk-thumping. At least a small part of it.
Think about this scene for a second.
Here is an elected member of a party that traces its ideological lineage to the Self-Respect Movement, rationalism, and EVR Periyar's hammer, standing on the floor of the legislature and deploying the exact Narasimha-avatar theological script from Hindu mythology to praise his party president. A rationalist party member arguing that the Chief Minister is literally omnipresent in atomic particles.
You can't even get angry at it. The absurdity is too pure.
Look, sycophancy in Indian politics isn't news. I don't care when someone like CTR Nirmal Kumar or the Union Finance Minister or our TN industries minister Keerthana or the usual RSS and BJP brigade goes on television and spouts imperial nonsense or praises authoritarian power. They have always worshipped hierarchy, strongmen, and colonial discipline. Nor is anyone surprised when ADMK cadres throw themselves flat on the asphalt before their supremo's convoy. That is their native ecosystem.
What baffles me is why an MLA from a Dravidian party in Tamil Nadu, in the year 2026, would reach into the historical dustbin and pick Winston Churchill as his benchmark for a noble statesman.
Yes, Clement Attlee praised Churchill after the war. British Labour politicians have spent decades saying polite things about Churchill. But that was British wartime nationalism. It was imperial Britain patting itself on the back for surviving the Blitz.
Why should anyone in Chennai, in Madras, or in Vilathikulam give a flying fuck about British imperial nostalgia?
Winston Churchill was a vile, genocidal imperialist who despised Indians with every fiber of his aristocratic being. He began his military career in the 1890s right here in the Madras command and Bangalore cantonment, treating the subcontinent as an exotic hunting ground for young officers while the population was crushed under colonial levies. In 1943, when the Bengal Famine starved over three million human beings to death in the ditches of rural Bengal, Churchill actively refused to divert Australian wheat shipments to Calcutta, keeping grain stockpiled for theoretical Mediterranean reserves instead. When his own Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, begged for emergency relief, Churchill dismissed the dying as people who "breed like rabbits," and casually scrawled in the margins of famine cables asking why Mahatma Gandhi hadn't starved to death yet.
As I wrote years ago in The Respectable Butcher, Western history loves to forgive mass murder as long as the killer speaks in grand cadences and wears a respectable waistcoat. But that doesn't mean we have to import the fraud into Madras.
To take a man responsible for the engineered starvation of millions of our own people and present him to the Tamil assembly as a "god-like soul" is staggering historical illiteracy.
And equating M.K. Stalin to Winston Churchill isn't just laughable praise. It is an active insult to Stalin.
Stalin has plenty of flaws. He runs a heavily dynastic, patronage-driven regional party machine with all the usual rent-seeking compromises of state politics. But Stalin is an infinitely better human being and statesman than Winston Churchill ever was. To be honest, many of the functioning human beings on the street would be a better person than Churchill was. Equating a regional Chief Minister to a colonial butcher who starved three million peasants isn't the grand compliment Markandayan thought it was. It's just embarrassing.
Come on DMK. Wtf.
I know I am nitpicking small things when there are so many other things to talk about. And instead of talking about the ruling party, I am talking about the opposition. It might seem unfair to the DMK, but I want to hold the DMK to higher standards than the BJP or TVK.
The strangest part of the speech is that once Markandayan stopped the Churchill circlejerk, his actual critique of the budget was surprisingly sharp and grounded.
He pulled out the budget papers and started taking apart the new TVK government's cosmetic rebranding:
"MRK allocated 1,183 crore rupees for micro irrigation covering 3 lakh acres, but in this budget you only allocated 735 crores! Drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, tube irrigation... you just renamed the scheme 'thuli thuliyai'! In our village we depend on rainfed farming, not canals. What subsidy did you give from the State Equalisation Fund to our cattle herders, goat rearers, and vermicompost makers? DAP subsidy is 63,000 rupees a ton, urea subsidy is 37,000, what did our small rainfed farmers get? You just took the garden here and called it a flower bed over there. You took the avocado and renamed it butter fruit!"
That is spot on. TVK has basically turned into a sticker-sticking party, slapping new cinema brand names onto existing DMK and AIADMK welfare programs without increasing the actual fiscal outlays for dryland farmers.
And his point on public debt was equally solid.
While TVK and newspaper headlines run around screaming about Tamil Nadu's debt and individual per-capita liability to score cheap political points, Markandayan rightly pointed out that debt taken for capital expenditure is an investment in the state's future:
"Does this debt go into Thangam Thennarasu's pocket? Go look at the Panjappur bus terminus in Trichy. Go look at the Kelambakkam terminus, the Guindy flyover, the new government medical colleges that AIADMK and DMK built. That is educational development, medical development, social index development! When businessmen buy an Innova car for 37 lakhs or build apartments in Chennai, do they bring cash from home? They take a loan. A state takes loans for capital expenditure, for human development, to build assets for the poor."
He is right. Debt is not inherently evil if it is channeled into physical infrastructure, schools, and hospitals that expand the productive capacity of the state.
Which makes the opening five minutes of his speech even more frustrating.
When you have legitimate arguments to make about rainfed agriculture, the State Equalisation Fund, capital expenditure, and the ruling party's empty sticker-sticking stunts, why drown it all under a mountain of servile nonsense about Winston Churchill and god avatars?
It's the complete theatre of democracy: part devotional cult, part sharp fiscal debate, and completely unhinged from start to finish.
Image Credit: Honoré Daumier, Quand un orateur ennuyeux est à la tribune, 19th century via Wikimedia Commons (National Gallery of Art, CC0).