In Coimbatore on Sunday, Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) president and DMK stooge Kamal Haasan stood beside DMK’s Coimbatore South candidate V Senthil Balaji and declared with characteristic flair: “Coimbatore is going to create a new change in Tamil Nadu’s political history. There is one fort, Fort St. George, and here too there is going to be a fort. The person who is going to begin and set this off is him. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam this is going to become a fort.”
It was a rousing endorsement. It was also, for anyone with a memory longer than five years, a stunning reversal.
What Kamal Haasan Said in 2021
Rewind to 2021. MNM was contesting the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections independently, positioning itself as the clean alternative to the two-party Dravidian duopoly. Kamal Haasan, campaigning for his own party against the DMK, told voters in the same Coimbatore: “When the great party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, was formed; it was the compulsion of that era. That is why it was formed. Today, its departure too is the compulsion of this era.”
He did not stop there. Addressing voters directly, he said, “You, who have the eligibility and the right to put that era behind us, must demonstrate it. Only if you do that will the country be set right. I don’t need to explain to you the logic that replacing one corrupt party with another corrupt party simply cannot be the answer.”
Read that last line again. “Replacing one corrupt party with another corrupt party simply cannot be the answer.”
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In 2021, Kamal Haasan stood in Coimbatore and told voters that DMK’s departure was a historical necessity – a relic of a corrupt old order that Tamil Nadu needed to move past. Five years later, he returned to the same city to campaign for the same party, calling it a fort of hope. The candidate he is now endorsing, V Senthil Balaji, was arrested by the ED in a money laundering case in 2023, precisely the kind of figure his 2021 rhetoric was written to describe.
MNM won zero seats on the strength of that anti-DMK campaign; its leader is now on stage for DMK. Political realignments happen, but most politicians manage them without having left behind quite so precise and quotable a verdict on the party they now champion and Kamal Haasan’s explanation for the change in his original stance to align fully with the DMK – just to keep the BJP or rather ‘saffron forces’ away is a lie he is telling himself and fooling the people too.
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