One of the most satisfying defeats on the recently concluded Tamil Nadu Assembly polls is that of Lehmann Bros fame intellectual pro max ‘pannaiyar’ PTR Palanivel Thiagarajan of the DMK.
This is especially satisfying because PTR is known to be abusive and ran the DMK IT wing that carried out a coordinated abuse against a specific community on social media. No prizes for guessing which community that is.
Coming back to the poll results, while many were talking about how TRB Rajaa, the DMK Industries minister ran the DMK IT wing specifically to abuse journalists, those affected reminded people about the ‘decorum and dignity’ of the previous in-charge of the IT wing – PTR.
No prizes for guessing how many times he drops the names of the universities he attended, the number of degrees he has got, the places he has worked or his ‘aanda parambarai’ history – the list of ancestors in his lineage.
Chandra Srikanth, an Editor with the financial and business news website Moneycontrol, had put out a tweet on 25 May 2022 saying that a top leader’s son is involved in a mega land grab.
“Met a friend from Chennai recently. Apparently some mega land grab going on by one top leader’s son in law. “You cannot sell any land parcel above 5 crore in Chennai if you dont sell it to this guy” The more things change….”, the woman journalist wrote.
Responding to this tweet, Tamil Nadu Finance Minister PTR Palanivel Thiagarajan abused the woman journalist by invoking her caste identity.
He called her tweet as ‘illogical rumor-mongering’ and insinuated that her tweet was ‘usual wage-work for covert agents, especially of certain (thread) ilk’.
Many reminded that the ‘thread ilk’ in Palanivel Thiagarajan’s tweet is a vile reference to Brahmins.
Cut to 2026, the same woman journalist reminded people of how he called her ‘thread ilk’.
Decorum and dignity…. https://t.co/MZIkX1NRic pic.twitter.com/II6pFkqgij
— Chandra R. Srikanth (@chandrarsrikant) May 5, 2026
This is the decorum and dignity with which PTR ran the DMK IT wing with him being the chief abuser.
That instance in 2022 was not the first time that Palanivel Thiagarajan who often boasts of coming from an illustrious family, having studied and worked abroad, has resorted to abusing woman journalists. He had earlier attacked Malini Parthasarathy, The Hindu Publishing Group’s Chairperson saying that she needed ‘counselling’. This attack came after Malini Parthasarathy shared an article of The Hindu which carried Isha Foundation’s response to Palanivel Thiagarajan’s abuses on Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.
In another instance, Palanivel Thiagarajan when he was the DMK IT Wing head indulged in denigrating a Ramnath Goenka Award Winning journalist Sandhya Ravishankar who had exposed some of the false rhetoric of the Pollachi Sexual Abuse case.
Palanivel Thiagarajan had also unleashed abuses and made personal attacks on Coimbatore South MLA Vanathi Srinivasan who had called out the former for insulting Goa during the 43rd GST Council meeting.
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