In more than one way, it's a setback for the DMK and Chief Minister Stalin in political terms.
The electoral fall-out, if any, will have to wait until the next summer, only when assembly elections are due in the state, explains N Sathiya Moorthy.
If actor-politician Vijay had thought that his Tamizhaga Vettri Kazhagam's two-day week-end training session for booth agents way ahead of next year's assembly elections in Tamil Nadu would capture media space near-exclusively, it was not to be.
Fair enough, the party conference in western Coimbatore city did gather a lot of youth, as with his earlier outings, which however remain rare and far between, but Vijay had to fight for media space with post-Pahalgam nation-wide reaction on the one hand and the imminent sacking of two DMK ministers in the state, on the other.
That's the irony of the situation as far as the ruling party and Chief Minister M K Stalin go.
On a day he was publicly hailing the Supreme Court verdict that ticked off governor R N Ravi's constitutional over-reach, the chief minister was also forwarding to the Raj Bhavan the resignation letters of two ministers, whose conduct the higher judiciary had condemned in no uncertain terms.
On Sunday, the DMK organised a public felicitation of the chief minister for steadfastly fighting the Supreme Court case on the governor row, where the party also honoured three senior advocates who had argued the state government's case.
The very same day, the chief minister, in turn, obtained the resignations of Excise and Electricity Minister V Senthil Balaji and Forests Minister K Ponmudy -- both after the Supreme Court, and the Madras high court, respectively, had questioned the probity and propriety of their continuing in office, under the given circumstances.
The two ministers had lost their jobs earlier during the course of court proceedings against them, in different corruption cases from the past.
Senthil Balaji is facing corruption charges pertaining to his role as transport minister under the rival AIADMK regime of late Jayalalithaa (2011-16).
But when the Supreme Court gave them a reprieve, Chief Minister Stalin promptly reinstated them -- and the otherwise adversarial Governor Ravi complied, without contesting.
But the SC was not pleased with Balaji being re-inducted the day after he obtained bail after serving 410 days in prison.
The two-judge division bench began questioning the propriety and legality of it recently while hearing the ED's petition against cancelling the minister's bail, alleging that he was 'influencing' petitioners to rescind.
A point came when on Friday, the bench told Balaji's counsel to choose between constitutional position and freedom and liberty under Article 21. He had little choice.
The case against Ponmudy this time was different.
While hearing a pending corruption case against the 75-year-old one-time Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) activist, Justice Anand Venkatesh of the Madras high court ordered suo motu criminal case against him, for what is accepted as his obscene and obnoxious references to Hindu religious symbols.
The court qualified the references as 'hate-speech' under the law -- which it seemingly was.
In more than one way, it's a setback for the DMK and Chief Minister Stalin in political terms.
The electoral fall-out, if any, will have to wait until the next summer, when assembly elections are due in the state.
Some in the DMK argue against what they call 'judicial over-reach' in both cases -- and reel out their arguments.
They also have reservations about the high court upholding the ED's powers to detain government officials, including women, for hours and days together, in the 'TASMAC raid case'.
Indications are that the state government would be moving the Supreme Court, as a precedent once set could have consequences if and when central agencies decide to target one state government department after another in the very same way.
However, motor-mouths in the DMK are stymied from speaking out in public as the leadership has been hailing the Supreme Court verdict that deployed Article 142 powers to confer deemed assent to multiple bills passed by the state assembly, on which Governor Ravi was sitting over for an inexplicable length of time.
For days now, leaders of the ruling BJP at the Centre have been highly critical of 'judicial over-reach' in context.
They have been arguing that the Supreme Court had no Article 142 powers in the matter, that too without serving notice on the President, whose powers the bench had 'usurped'.
It translates that the DMK at least cannot go on a self-contradicting mode -- of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, and also be seen as doing so.
There is also another reason why the ruling party is circumspect in the matter, as the public mood in the state seems to be veering round to favour the DMK's line of thinking vis a vis the governor's constitutional powers and the incumbent's political messaging, loud or muted.
Before the weekend resignation drama took the centre-stage and prolonged for two or three days when the final outcome had already been scripted into the text, Governor Ravi hosting a conference of vice-chancellors of the universities in the state had come in for a lot of flak from the DMK, its allies and also a substantial section of the general public.
Even the mood in the rival AIADMK in the revived BJP alliance in the state was sullen, for more reasons than one.
One, there was general dismay about the governor's conduct, indicating that the incumbent had not drawn his political /propriety lessons from the SC verdict.
Two, by doing so, Governor Ravi was also handing over yet another anti-Centre, anti-BJP agenda-point on the platter to the ruling party, which was otherwise said to be facing 'anti-incumbency', purportedly of a high order.
What has irked the voter, starting with the first-generation Tamil, is the governor inviting Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankar as the chief guest at the VCs conference, even when he had reasons to suspect that most, if not all the VCs would boycott the same, especially after the SC upholding the state bills that limited the governor's powers as the chancellor.
The discerning also pointed to the distinctive difference between the TN amendments and the law as prevailing in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Gujarat, for instance.
The Gujarat law provides for the chief minister to be the chancellor of all varsities in the state.
The Tamil Nadu amendment only took away the Chancellor's power to appoint VCs, but retained the rest of the powers and pelf otherwise conferred on the office of the governor, all along.
As may be recalled, only a week earlier, VP Dhankhar had caught the national media's attention when he nearly castigated the Supreme Court for deploying 'missile power'.
Yet, he might have been out of place in every which way.
Generally, politicians in Dhankhar's place -- and not necessarily VP -- had used the floor of Parliament to make strong and controversial observations against the nation's judiciary, so that they did not attract contempt of court.
He was also factually wrong as he was referring to judicial power interfering with the might of the legislature, that too when it was the governor (and possibly the President's Office) that had challenged the legislative authority of the Tamil Nadu state assembly.
In effect, Dhankhar was actually defending the state of Tamil Nadu and the state assembly against the governor, and not as he might have intended.
Yet, it was all enough for him to be seen as an enemy of federal principles in general and anti-Tamil in particular.
Translated, it still means that between them, VP Dhankar and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have become the new faces of anti-Tamil adversity in the long run-up to the assembly elections.
Where does Amit Shah fit in?
Independent of the DMK's stoic silence, Shah's handling of AIADMK boss and former Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswamy (EPS) during their joint news conference announcing the revival of their electoral alliance for the assembly polls has not gone down well.
AIADMK cadres are sulking that their leader was insulted by not being asked to announce the alliance-revival and not being allowed even to address the news conference.
According to the cadres, EPS's body language at the joint news conference said it all.
What, however, concerns them even more is the kind of message that the news conference had sent across, especially when political rivals will replay it at every street-corner and through friendly YouTube channels closer to the election.
The idea, according to them, would be for the DMK to allow an impression to be created in the voter's mind that the BJP leaders were too bossy for Tamil Nadu's comfort, just as the party's hard-line Hindutva ideology and practices across the country was a dampener for the AIADMK and alliance through the past decade.
Whether intended or otherwise, the BJP national leadership seems to be creating new hurdles for the Opposition alliance to win back the state next year.
Not only can their conduct and comments overshadow the DMK's anti-incumbency, but it also can jeopardise cadre-cooperation at the grassroots-level, despite the long gestation period available at present.
There is a difference, though, as Governor Ravi, until recently, used to be seen only as an unending administrative nuisance.
Now after the Supreme Court verdict and more so his daring decision to host the VCs' conference despite what essentially are judicial strictures of the highest order, he is being seen also as a face and political weapon of the ruling BJP at the Centre, with and without the party's hard-line Hindutva, which he purportedly seeks to soft-sell in the 'Dravidian state'.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
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