When IUML Minister A.M. Shahjahan took office at the Tamil Nadu Secretariat on 22 May 2026, Islamic prayers were recited loudly and clearly inside the building before he assumed his ministerial chair. Video evidence shows prayers being offered in an official government space.
Now imagine the exact inverse: a Hindu priest chanting shlokas inside the Secretariat before a Hindu minister took office. The reaction would have been instantaneous and volcanic. Every major news channel would have run primetime debates on “saffronisation of government.” Social media would have erupted with warnings about India sliding toward theocracy. Op-eds would have condemned it as a brazen violation of constitutional secularism. Civil society would have demanded immediate resignations.
That is the uncomfortable truth Tamil Nadu’s political class refuses to acknowledge: the standard for religious expression in state institutions changes depending on whose religion is being expressed. When it involves Hindu symbolism, the red lines are clear, bright, and ruthlessly enforced. When it involves minority faiths, those same lines blur, bend, or disappear entirely behind a fog of selective silence and strategic indifference.
The Secretariat is not a mosque, temple, or church. It is the administrative headquarters of a constitutional government that claims to be secular. Secular does not mean hostile to religion. It means the state itself remains equidistant from all faiths, neither favouring nor disfavouring any.
The TVK government that claims to be secular has now presided over two instances of religious ritual inside state institutions: first, JCD Prabhakar reciting Bible verses, and now Islamic prayers offered for IUML Minister Shahjahan at the Secretariat. Curiously, no Hindu minister or MLA has performed a similar puja or recited shlokas. The pattern seems ideological.
TVK’s own MLA Aadhav Arjuna explicitly stated the party’s goal is same as the DMK – to “eradicate Sanatana Dharma.” A TVK MLA Mustafa from Madurai Central echoed this position. So the game is transparent: secularism means accommodating every faith except Hinduism. Bible verses? Acceptable. Islamic prayers? Welcome. Hindu rituals? Eradication-worthy.
Remember, when Udhayanidhi Stalin repeated the call to eradicate Sanatana Dharma in the floor of the assembly, Chief Minister, ‘secular-in-chief’ looked on and smiled. He has not said anything so far against Aadhav Arjuna or his MLA Mustafa regarding the hate speech against Hindus, yet.
This is selective erasure marketed as progressivism. The Secretariat has become a stage for demonstrating which religions deserve public dignity and which must be confined to private invisibility. The rationalist legacy Tamil Nadu claims to uphold never meant privileging some faiths over others – it meant keeping all faiths out of state machinery.
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