CHENNAI: Superstar Rajinikanth’s fan club Rajini Makkal Mandram (RMM) is struggling to enlist booth committee members for 65,000 polling stations in the State. “Till now, we have managed to appoint only 30 per cent booth committee members. Initially, we thought it would be a very easy task as we had fan clubs in each and every village. But the ground reality is different,” said an RMM district level functionary.Rajini has one of the largest fan clubs in the State, but the irony now is that the actor’s older fans, who joined the fan club in the early 1980s, have shifted allegiance to other political outfits or have been indifferent to politics.
Since fan club activities were minimal for the last two decades and were only active during release of Rajini’s films and his birth anniversary functions, reviving it is turning out to be a difficult task for RMM office-bearers. “Approximately, we had around 600 fans clubs in the district till mid 1990s. Of them, only 225 had been registered as the headquarters of the fans associations stopped registering new clubs in early 90s. We did not want to encourage new associations as we could not offer first day first show tickets to them due to limited screening on those days,” says a former district secretary of Rajinikanth fans association.
But now the challenge is to revive the lost base. “Thalaivar wanted to reconstruct the fans association structure and he instructed us through State functionaries that we should constitute booth-level committees in all 65,000 stations to float a political party. But we could not find our fan base in rural TN when we visited the villages recently as many of them are actively functioning with various political parties and some are not interested in politics,” an RMM office-bearer confided.
Interestingly, recruiting new members to the RMM has also been a challenge for office-bearers. “Major political parties are threatening villagers that they may forfeit government welfare schemes if they get themselves enrolled in RMM,” said another union level office-bearer.
Even the social media has failed to charm the actor’s followers. The RMM’s official Facebook account has only 3,466 followers till now. However, in 1996, Rajini was seen as a ‘kingmaker’ after he expressed his open support to the DMK-led alliance in Assembly elections, resulting in its victory. At that time, Rajini’s fans urged him to contest elections. The hesitant Superstar, who had his fans guessing till 2017, took a decision on political plunge in December 31 last year stating that his party will contest all 234 Assembly constituencies without any alliance.