Home News The Freebie U-Turn: TVK Vijay Promises What He Once Mocked

The Freebie U-Turn: TVK Vijay Promises What He Once Mocked

By
The Commune
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There was a time, not very long ago, when Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) fans occupied the moral high ground on one specific issue with extraordinary self-righteousness: freebies.

In interview after interview, at rally after rally, in social media post after social media post, the TVK ecosystem positioned itself as the antidote to Tamil Nadu’s freebie culture. Vijay was going to be different. He was going to talk about real governance: jobs, education, infrastructure – not the cynical vote-buying that DMK and AIADMK had normalised over decades of competitive populism. His fans, hot-blooded youngsters, educated (or so we think), social-media-savvy spent considerable energy mocking DMK’s Magalir Urimai scheme and AIADMK’s election promises as undignified bribes to voters.

Here are a few videos of them disposing of the freebies from ADMK/DMK regimes, mocking welfare schemes etc.

That was then.

On March 7, 2026, standing before a crowd in Mahabalipuram, Vijay announced a dazzling array of, and let us be precise here, freebies. He just did not call them that. And that, in essence, is the story of TVK’s entire political evolution: the packaging changes, the product remains the same, and the fans find reasons to explain why their freebies are not actually freebies.

The Promise That Started It All

When TVK launched, Vijay was careful to distinguish himself from the freebie-dispensing political culture of Tamil Nadu. He spoke of empowerment rather than entitlement. He spoke of creating conditions where people would not need government handouts – jobs, skill development, quality education, and infrastructure that would make Tamil Nadu genuinely self-sufficient.

His fans amplified this relentlessly. Posts comparing TVK’s “developmental agenda” with DMK’s “freebie politics” flooded social media. YouTube channels ran hours of content explaining how Vijay’s approach was fundamentally different – sustainable, forward-looking, rooted in economic thinking rather than electoral desperation.

The implicit message was clear: those other parties buy votes with your own money. We are above that.

7 March 2026: The U-Turn in Full Glory

So what did Vijay announce on Women’s Day?

  • ₹2,500 per month for women
  • 6 free LPG cylinders per year
  • 8 grams of gold for marriages
  • A gold ring for newborns
  • Free bus travel for women
  • ₹15,000 per year to prevent school dropouts
  • ₹5 lakh loans for self-help groups

He called these “sample promises.” His fans called them “empowerment schemes.” His critics called them what they are: freebies.

But here is what makes this U-turn not merely embarrassing – it makes it politically fraudulent. Because when you strip away the freshly minted names like “Annapoorna Super Six” and “Thai Maman Gold Ring Scheme” and look at the actual content of each promise, you find something remarkable:

Almost none of them are new.

The Rebranding Exercise – Old Win In New Bottle

Let us go through them one by one.

Free bus travel for women. The DMK’s Vidiyal Payanam scheme has been providing free bus travel in buses since 2021. As of April 2025, 57.81 lakh women benefit daily. This is not a TVK promise – it is a DMK scheme that Vijay is promising to continue and improvise a little to present as his own idea. These schemes are also in operation in various other states.

6 free LPG cylinders per year. The Central government’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana already provides free LPG connections to BPL women with subsidised refills. Vijay is now promising to formalise what the Modi government has been delivering.

8 grams of gold for marriages. The Tamil Nadu government’s marriage assistance scheme, which has been running in various forms for decades, through multiple governments including AIADMK and DMK, already provides exactly 8 grams of 22-carat gold to eligible women. The DMK government alone allocated ₹117.18 crore for this in 2023. This scheme predates Vijay’s political career. He is promising what women in Tamil Nadu are already receiving.

Thaalikku Thangam (AIADMK): This existing government scheme, originally launched by the AIADMK, provides gold (historically 4 to 8 grams) and cash assistance for the marriage of women from economically weaker sections.

Baby kits for newborns. The Amma Baby Care Kit is a welfare scheme launched in 2015 by the late CM J. Jayalalithaa to improve neonatal hygiene and encourage institutional deliveries. Distributed to mothers at government hospitals, each kit contains 16 essential items valued at approximately ₹1,000.
Key components include:
For the Baby: A towel, dress, bed, mosquito net, napkin, oil, shampoo, soap, nail clipper, and toys.
For the Mother: Hand wash, soap, and Sowbagya Sundi Lehiyam (ayurvedic medicine for lactation).
The scheme targets over 6 lakh newborns annually, aiming to reduce the Infant Mortality Rate among economically weaker sections.

There was another scheme brought in by the AIADMK government for pregnant women – This scheme is distinct from the Amma Maternity Nutrition Kit, which provides nutritional supplements (like health mix, dates, and iron syrup) worth ₹2,000 in two installments during pregnancy.

Gold Ring for Newborns – The “Thaai Maaman Gold Ring Scheme”. This is perhaps the most embarrassing of all – this scheme already ran under MK Stalin’s own father Karunanidhi, inaugurated by Stalin himself in 2009 for babies with Tamil names in Chennai. Under the AIADMK, they routinely presented gold rings to newborns on the leaders’ birthdays. This is not a TVK original. It is not even a new idea. In June 2009, the Chennai Corporation under Karunanidhi launched a scheme to give 1-gram gold rings to newborns born in Corporation hospitals if they were given Tamil names. The scheme was announced by the then-Chennai Mayor to commemorate Karunanidhi’s 86th birthday. And who inaugurated it? MK Stalin himself – then Deputy Chief Minister.

Vijay has taken a scheme invented by his political rivals, given it a new name and presented it as his own visionary governance idea.

₹2,500 per month for women. The DMK’s Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thittam already provides ₹1,000 per month to over one crore women in the state since September 2023. Vijay is promising to increase it by ₹1,500. This is not an original idea – it is an incremental bid on a scheme he spent years implying was vote-buying. Once again, this welfare scheme is in place in various states across the country.

₹15,000 Per Year to Prevent School Dropouts. This already exists in multiple layers – Vijay is repackaging the entire existing scholarship ecosystem. Tamil Nadu already has an extensive network of scholarship and cash incentive schemes specifically targeting school retention, many of which provide comparable or higher amounts than Vijay’s proposed ₹15,000:​

  • Pudhumai Penn Scheme (DMK, launched 2022) – provides ₹1,000 per month (₹12,000 per year) directly to girl students pursuing higher education after school. Over 4 lakh girls benefit.​
  • Tamil Pudhalvan Scheme – equivalent scheme for boys in higher education.​
  • Post-Matric Scholarship for SC/ST/BC/MBC – covers full fee reimbursement plus academic allowance of up to ₹13,500 per year for hostellers in professional courses.​
  • Central Sector Scheme of Scholarship (CSSS) – Central government scholarship for Class 12 students scoring 60%+ entering UG.​
  • Incentive Scheme for Rural MBC/DNC Girl Students – cash incentives from Classes 3–6.​
  • Differently Abled Students Scholarship – cash incentives from Class 9 onwards.​

The Tamil Nadu government already provides free uniforms, free textbooks, free noon meals, free bus passes, and free bicycles to school students – all of which are existing anti-dropout measures

Vijay’s ₹15,000 per year is essentially a consolidation and slight increase over what the Pudhumai Penn scheme already provides and it duplicates the Central government’s existing scholarship architecture. Far from being an original promise, it is a re-announcement of schemes his fans spent years dismissing as “DMK freebies.”

₹5 Lakh Loans for Self-Help Groups

This is almost similar to the Central government’s PM Mudra Yojana. The Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY), launched by PM Modi on 8 April 2015, provides collateral-free loans to small and micro enterprises under the below categories:

  • Shishu – up to ₹50,000
  • Kishor – ₹50,000 to ₹5 lakh
  • Tarun – ₹5 lakh to ₹10 lakh
  • Tarun Plus – up to ₹20 lakh for repeat borrowers​

Vijay’s promise of ₹5 lakh loans for SHGs lands exactly at the Kishor category ceiling of PM Mudra Yojana – the same scheme that has been disbursing loans to women’s self-help groups across Tamil Nadu since 2015. The scheme requires no collateral, no guarantor – the same features Vijay is promising.​

Additionally, Tamil Nadu’s own Mahalir Thittam (Women’s Development Corporation) has been providing SHG loans at subsidised rates for over two decades. The DMK government has been disbursing ₹1,600 crore worth of SHG loans annually through this scheme.

During the AIADMK tenure under Jayalalithaa and Edappadi K. Palaniswami (EPS), SHG support focused on financial independence through Bank Linkage. SHGs received loans starting from ₹1.5 lakh, scaling up to ₹10-20 lakh based on performance. A ₹15,000 Revolving Fund was granted to new groups to boost internal lending. The government subsidized interest rates, often reducing the burden to 7% for prompt payers. In 2020, EPS launched special collateral-free loans up to ₹1 lakh per group to mitigate pandemic distress. Extensive funding was provided through Panchayat Level Federations for livelihood projects.

Vijay is promising, with great fanfare, what the Modi government has been delivering since 2015 and what the DMK state government has been running since the 1990s.

So, to summarise: Vijay is promising schemes with improvisations and additions to schemes that already exist, presenting it all as TVK’s visionary governance agenda.

The Fan Ecosystem’s Contortions

What is perhaps most revealing is watching the TVK supporter base perform the intellectual gymnastics required to reconcile “we are against freebies” with “our leader just promised free gas cylinders, free bus rides, and free gold.”

The explanations have been creative:

“These are not freebies, these are rights.” – A freebie is a government benefit provided free of cost to citizens. Calling it a “right” changes the moral framing but not the economic reality. The government still pays for it. Someone’s taxes still fund it.

“DMK’s freebies are corrupt, Vijay’s will be properly implemented.” – This is an argument about execution, not about principle. If your objection to DMK’s schemes was that they were poorly implemented, you were never actually against freebies — you were against DMK. That is a legitimate political position, but it is not the high-minded anti-freebie stance you were claiming.

“Vijay is promising development too, not just freebies.” – So does every party. DMK’s 2021 manifesto had infrastructure promises too. AIADMK’s manifesto has development schemes too. The existence of development promises alongside welfare schemes does not transform welfare schemes into something other than welfare schemes.

“These are investments in human capital.” – Free gold for weddings is not an investment in human capital. It is a wedding gift from the government, funded by taxpayers.

None of these arguments would have been accepted by TVK fans if DMK had made them. They are being accepted now only because it is Vijay making them.

The Deeper Problem: What This Reveals About TVK

Vijay’s U-turn on freebies is not just politically embarrassing – it is strategically revealing. It tells you something important about what TVK has concluded about Tamil Nadu’s electorate.

TVK has discovered what every party before it has discovered: that Tamil Nadu’s voters respond to direct material benefits. That the urban, educated, anti-freebie voter is a social media demographic, not an electoral majority. That the woman in Villupuram and the farmer in Thanjavur and the daily wage worker in Tirunelveli are not going to vote for “developmental governance” in the abstract when the party next door is offering them cash in hand.

There is nothing wrong with this discovery. It is an accurate reading of electoral democracy. The problem is that TVK built an entire identity and attracted an entire base of supporters on the premise that it was above this kind of politics. Those supporters now find themselves defending exactly the political culture they rallied against.

Vijay is not the first politician to discover that principles are expensive in election season. He will not be the last. But rarely has a political party pivoted so completely, so quickly, and with such apparent confidence that its own supporters will not notice or will notice but not care.

The Real Question Tamil Nadu Should Ask

Here is what Tamil Nadu’s voters deserve an answer to:

If the gold for marriages was “vote-buying” when the DMK funded it, why is it “women’s empowerment” when Vijay announces it?

If the monthly cash transfer was “fiscal irresponsibility” when Kalaignar Magalir Urimai launched in 2023, why is it a “right” when Vijay promises ₹2,500?

The answer, of course, is that it was never about the freebies. It was always about who was giving them. Tamil Nadu’s political parties, including its newest one, have simply found different ways to say the same thing: vote for me and I will give you something.

Vijay has joined that club. He just arrived wearing a different shirt.

And the most honest thing his fans could do, the thing that would actually honour the anti-freebie principle they spent years advocating, is to say: we were wrong to mock other parties for this, because now our own leader is doing the same thing.

That admission will not come. It never does.

Instead, the same accounts that posted threads about “freebie culture destroying Tamil Nadu” are now posting threads about “TVK’s empowerment revolution.”

The revolution, it turns out, comes with free gas cylinders.

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