The campaigns for the upcoming Tamil Nadu Assembly elections are taking place at a frenzied pace. Madurai Central constituency which has DMK’s PTR Palanivel Thiagarajan and actor-director Sundar C contesting in the AIADMK’s symbol is grabbing everyone’s attention.
BJP leader Annamalai campaigned for Sundar C and exposed PTR massively for all the statements that he has been making against Sundar C.
As BJP’s K. Annamalai took the stage in Madurai Central, he didn’t mince words. “Madurai Corporation corruption, ₹200 crore, who did this?” he thundered. “The Mayor’s husband. Arrested in August, out on bail by October.” The question, he said, was one that PTR Palanivel Thiagarajan — the sitting DMK MLA and candidate for Madurai Central — had conspicuously refused to answer.
The scam at the centre of this political storm is no allegation. In August 2025, the Madurai city police’s Central Crime Branch arrested Pon Vasanth (49), husband of Madurai Corporation Mayor Indrani Ponvasanth, in connection with a massive ₹200 crore property tax fraud. The fraud, investigators found, occurred between 1 April 2022 and 31 July 2024 – the period during which Pon Vasanth wielded considerable influence over the civic body as secretary of DMK’s Madurai-Arapalayam unit.
The modus operandi was brazen. Pon Vasanth allegedly approached prominent property owners and offered to ensure their properties were not subject to tax hikes – in exchange for under-the-table payments. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens faced property tax increases of anywhere between 25% and 100%. At least 13 individuals were arrested in connection with the case, and over 15 corporation workers, including bill collectors and data entry operators, were suspended.
The Madras High Court, unimpressed by bail applications, denied Pon Vasanth’s plea, with Justice S. Srimathy’s bench emphasising the “gravity of evidence” against him. A Special Investigation Team led by DIG Abhinav Kumar was constituted on High Court orders, and investigators traced money trails through multiple middlemen, recovering digital footprints of repeated nighttime logins to tax portals.
By October 2025, the political fallout became untenable. Mayor Indrani Ponvasanth resigned from office, tendering her resignation in Chennai, reportedly under the direct supervision of senior state minister KN Nehru, citing “personal reasons.” The Madurai Corporation Council formally approved her resignation at an emergency meeting, leaving the city without a Mayor.
Annamalai placed PTR squarely in the frame. He displayed a photograph showing PTR, Udhayanidhi Stalin, and Pon Vasanth together, challenging PTR’s repeated public claim of having “absolutely no connection to the Corporation.” “The very man who served as his henchman, his personal enforcer, is Pon Vasanth,” Annamalai said. He also noted that Madurai, among India’s 40 cities with a population over one million, ranked last in cleanliness in a Central Government survey.
The scam has exposed what Annamalai called a deeper governance failure: ten years of PTR as MLA, broken sewage lines spewing waste near Madurai Meenakshi Temple’s Gopuram streets, and a city that has, in his words, been turned into “a garbage city.”
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