In what must rank as Tamil Nadu’s most deliciously ironic television moment in recent memory, two of the region’s most ideologically compromised media personalities sat across each other on screen and with breathtaking self-unawareness accused the other of being a propagandist.
The spectacle? Sumanth Raman, the all-in-all expert and political analyst whose soft Congress sympathies have been an open industry secret, going hammer and tongs against M Gunasekaran, Sun News Editor-in-Chief and certified product of the Dravidian ideological supply chain – each pointing fingers, each screaming “you have an agenda!”, each right about the other and catastrophically blind to themselves.
லைவ் ரோஸ்ட்😹 pic.twitter.com/4jWN59l9uS
— யாரோ (@yaaro_offl) March 11, 2026
Ladies and gentlemen: the Pot-Calling-Kettle-Black Grand Finals, live on Tamil television.
The Exchange – What Was Actually Said
The video clipping that is going viral on social media captures both men losing any semblance of journalistic composure. One accuses the other of running a “propaganda show”. The other fires back: “What agenda do I have? Then why are you blaming others? Why are you pointing at others?” The retort comes: “Do you have an agenda or not? Admit it!”
At one point, one literally tells the other, “you’re losing your composure”, which is the Tamil television equivalent of a man on fire lecturing someone else about fire safety.
The argument spirals further into competing claims of neutrality that neither man can credibly sustain for thirty seconds of scrutiny.
Meet Contestant #1: Sumanth Raman, Congress’s Dependable Defender
Let us be precise about who Sumanth Raman is. He is not simply a “political analyst.” He is a former sports quiz master turned all-in-all commentator – a man who has fashioned himself an authority on everything from military strategy to economic policy to theology, seemingly without formal credentials in any of these fields.
And his record speaks clearly.
On the fuel crisis panic (March 2026): When news of commercial LPG shortages broke amid West Asia tensions, Sumanth Raman rushed to his X handle to declare that “The Modi Govt has proved particularly inept at handling any crisis in the past.” The problem? The Central government had already clarified the evening before, on 9 March 2026 itself, that there was no fuel shortage, that petrol and diesel prices were unlikely to increase unless crude crossed $130 per barrel, and that India was actually positioned to export Aviation Turbine Fuel. Sumanth had either not read the news or chose to amplify panic anyway. This is the man who wants to be taken seriously as an analyst.
On fake news – a rich personal history: In March 2023, Sumanth Raman posted fake news about NPCI charging fees for UPI transactions, even ran a Twitter poll on it, and then quietly deleted both after the facts emerged. In February 2024, he smugly declared “Goa has had a UCC for decades but never mind facts”, conveniently forgetting that Goa got the UCC under Portuguese colonial rule, not as an independent Indian state’s initiative. In 2020, he amplified a viral post falsely claiming that a hospital ward was staged as a photoshoot for PM Modi’s Leh visit.
On calling others fake news peddlers: In June 2025, Sumanth Raman had the extraordinary audacity to call journalist Palki Sharma “a serial fake news peddler and propagandist” – doing so by quoting Mohammed Zubair, himself a widely questioned “fact-checker” with documented partisan leanings. This from a man who has a verified, timestamped paper trail of misinformation deletions and partisan amplifications.
On Pakistan and India-Pak tensions (May 2025): In the aftermath of the India-Pakistan ceasefire understanding, Sumanth Raman went on what can be described as “non-stop whine mode,” echoing narratives that aligned with Congress’s anti-government posturing. Not once did he apply the same critical lens to the Congress party that he routinely reserves for the BJP and Centre.
On the Taliban press conference (October 2025): When Congress amplified claims that women journalists were excluded from a Taliban Foreign Minister press conference in Delhi’s Afghan Embassy to attack the Central government, Sumanth Raman was right there, amplifying the Congress propaganda without any independent verification. Sumanth Raman, a “self-styled expert on everything” running cover for a party whose leaders had already put out the misleading framing.
The pattern, in every single instance, is identical: assume the worst about the BJP/Centre, amplify without verification, and quietly delete or ignore when facts contradict the narrative.
This is the man who sat across Gunasekaran and called him a propagandist.
Meet Contestant #2: Gunasekaran, Dravidian Ideology’s Embedded Journalist
If Sumanth’s bias is a tilt, Gunasekaran’s is a full architectural lean – one built across decades of Dravidianist ideological immersion.
The family connection that says everything: Gunasekaran is the son-in-law of Kali Poongundran (Kaliamurthy Naidu), who is the Deputy President of Dravida Kazhagam (DK). This is not a rumour, an allegation, or an attack piece claim – it is a documented biographical fact. The DK is the parent ideological organisation of the Dravidian political movement, from whose womb DMK was born. Gunasekaran did not just accidentally end up at Sun News, the flagship media property historically intertwined with DMK’s ecosystem. He was family, literally.
The Maridhas exposé and the News18 exit (July 2020): Popular YouTuber Maridhas wrote a detailed letter to Network18 management alleging that Gunasekaran and other journalists had links to DK/DMK/Communist-aligned organisations, particularly a body called the Centre for Media Persons for Change (CMPC), whose associated content writers traced their lineage to an organisation whose directors included the son of an Anna Nagar DMK MLA and the son of a close confidante of MK Stalin. Following this exposé going viral, News18 took action, and Gunasekaran tendered his resignation on 31 July 2020. In his own goodbye letter, he spoke of how his channel covered NEET, GST, demonetisation, and “social justice”, conveniently the exact hitlist of issues that formed the backbone of DMK’s Opposition campaign agenda.
He was swiftly picked up by Sun News as its Editor-in-Chief – a move that could only be described as a direct hiring from an ideologically aligned talent pool.
The DMK-media mafia moment (July 2020): Simultaneously with Gunasekaran’s issues, Udhayanidhi Stalin, son of MK Stalin was filing defamation suits against independent voices, as Gunasekaran and News18 sued YouTuber Maridhas. The coordinated legal pressure against independent digital media voices at the exact moment legacy media was being called out for its Dravidianist links and that was how the Dravidianist media mafia was gagging independent voices.
The Justice GR Swaminathan distortion (February 2026): In his most recent documented act of editorial malpractice, Gunasekaran claimed on social media that “Madras High Court Justice GR Swaminathan called those who do not believe in spiritual gurus or the power of God ‘rascals, fools and barbarians'” – a framing designed to generate outrage against a sitting judge. A full reading of Justice Swaminathan’s speech at the Guru Vandana event in Hosur reveals he was explicitly responding to rationalists who abuse believers saying those who call us “immoral, foolish and barbaric” are themselves what they accuse us of. Gunasekaran stripped the crucial context and manufactured a controversy around a sitting High Court judge, textbook agenda journalism.
Sun News and the HP facility story (September 2024): When Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced a new HP production facility in Tamil Nadu, a development beneficial to the state, Sun News under Gunasekaran’s editorial leadership conspicuously failed to give the Centre credit for the announcement. This is documented selective reporting in favour of the DMK-led state government narrative.
This is the man who sat across Sumanth Raman and called him a propagandist.
The Deeper Absurdity: Two Propagandists Diagnosing Propaganda
What makes this exchange so cinematically perfect is that both men are correct about each other and both are constitutionally incapable of the self-awareness that would make their accusation meaningful.
Sumanth Raman, whose political analysis has reliably provided intellectual cover for Congress narratives, calling out a propagandist on air is like a defence lawyer complaining the prosecution is too adversarial. Gunasekaran, embedded in a media ecosystem, built brick-by-ideological-brick by the Dravidian movement, married into its institutional family, now heading a channel in a network historically intertwined with the very party he is supposed to cover as a journalist accusing someone else of having an “agenda” is not just ironic. It is cosmically comic.
“Nobody calls me out”, one of Gunasekaran insists on air. That sentence alone tells you everything. Not “I have no agenda.” Not “my record speaks for itself.” Just – nobody has held me accountable; therefore, I am unaccountable. That is not a defense of journalistic integrity. That is a declaration of institutional impunity.
What Tamil Audiences Deserve vs. What They Got
Tamil news television’s debate culture has long suffered from a fundamental structural rot: anchors and analysts who are umpires-for-hire, calling balls and strikes but always mysteriously ruling in favor of the same team. The audience is not fooled – as one speaker himself grudgingly admits mid-argument: “The people are watching. They know.”.
Indeed, they do. They know Sumanth’s Congress lean. They know Gunasekaran’s Dravidianist-DMK intellectual DNA. What they perhaps did not expect was the gift of watching both men rip each other’s carefully maintained masks off on live television, each proving the other’s point while proving their own unworthiness to make it.
Tamil media’s credibility crisis did not begin with this clip, but it has rarely been illustrated with such vivid, unintentional clarity. When the propagandists start calling each other propagandists, the only honest people left in the studio are the cameras.
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