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.
Annamalai campaigned for Sundar C and exposed PTR over and over again in his 30-minute speech.
When K. Annamalai held up his second photograph at the Madurai Central rally, he was careful to pre-empt the obvious rebuttal. “Because if I were to share this one, you might accuse me of having morphed it,” he told the crowd. The photograph he was holding up showed two individuals alongside PTR: a man named Ilakkuvan, and Jai Balaji – both of whom, Annamalai alleged, had used their proximity to PTR to loot crores of rupees from government tenders.
Jai Balaji, according to Annamalai, served as PTR’s personal assistant for a “considerable period” before being dismissed. “Jai Balaji was dismissed from his position for looting crores of rupees — specifically, for using PTR’s name to commit fraud in government tenders.” This is not merely a campaign allegation: in February 2026, news reports confirmed that PTR’s former assistant Jai Balaji and his wife Kalavathi were arrested by Madurai Central Crime Branch police on fraud charges. Multiple complainants had alleged that Jai Balaji collected money from contractors by promising government contracts using PTR’s name and from the public by promising land allotments and then defrauded them. Reports indicate the fraud ran to approximately ₹100 crore.
The second individual in the photograph, Ilakkuvan, is the more alarming case. Annamalai alleged that Ilakkuvan “engaged in the very same illicit activities” as Jai Balaji, and has since “fled the country and is no longer in India.” Annamalai said he had personally inquired with police contacts about Ilakkuvan’s whereabouts and had received no satisfactory answer. He turned the question directly to PTR at the rally: “Mr. PTR, please answer: Where did Ilakkuvan go? Where did Jai Balaji go? First, clean up the mess within your own household; only then should you enter the political arena to speak about Brother Sundar C or anyone else.”
The broader thrust of the attack was PTR’s public persona as an incorruptible technocrat – a Harvard and Oxford-educated former Lehmann Brothers banker who presents himself as a cut above regular politicians. PTR has repeatedly described himself as “educated” and above the rough-and-tumble of ordinary party politics. Annamalai used the Ilakkuvan-Jai Balaji association to puncture this image directly. “Yet, despite keeping associates like these two by his side, this man has the audacity to lecture us about integrity and purity,” he said.
The controversy adds to PTR’s already turbulent political record. In 2023, leaked audio tapes of PTR allegedly criticising the inner workings of the DMK government, describing it as unsustainable due to the outsized influence of CM Stalin’s son and son-in-law, cost him the Finance Ministry portfolio. PTR denied the tapes were authentic, calling them fabricated by a “blackmail gang.” He was reassigned to the IT Ministry, a portfolio seen as a political demotion.
Annamalai also raised PTR’s hereditary trusteeship of the Madurai Meenakshi Amman Temple as a further indictment of his tenure. “Is it not your family that holds the hereditary trusteeship? What is he asking for? He asks, as a devout worshipper, that those visiting the temple be provided with restrooms and toilets, and that the access roads be kept clean. Yet, what is the response? ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know who my father was?'” The demand for basic sanitation infrastructure at one of India’s most-visited temples, unmet across two terms, was presented as the most damning measure of PTR’s governance – not corruption, but simple, inexcusable neglect.
Subscribe to our channels on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and YouTube to get the best stories of the day delivered to you personally.
