CHENNAI: With Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu scheduled for next year, the ruling AIADMK team is taking a leaf out of the BJP’s book to rev up its meme campaign portraying DMK president MK Stalin as a dunce and a lightweight.
The saffron party, an ally of the AIADMK, famously succeeded in painting and mocking Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as a “pappu” (small boy) in the run-up to the 2014 parliamentary elections. Gandhi has been unable to completely shake it off even seven years later.
The AIADMK’s plan has been to highlight Stalin’s gaffes, in the hope of accomplishing a similar effect. To this end, the ruling party’s IT wing, with some support from the BJP, have been promoting hashtags such as #ThathiStalin (dunce Stalin) and #Sudalai Parithabangal (Sudalai tragedies, Sudalai being a mocking name for Stalin) on social media platforms for several months now.
The AIADMK campaign focuses on two ‘weaknesses’ of Stalin. First, his gaffes in public fora, often captured on video. Second, his limited abilities as an extemporaneous public speaker.
The IT wings have collected videos of his gaffes and worked hard to make them viral on Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp through thousands of social media users affiliated to the parties. With this, they aim to portray him as a “joker”. To highlight his limitations as a public speaker, they call him “thundu seetu” (chit of paper), mocking his tendency to refer to notes while speaking.
Aspire Swaminathan, coordinator of AIADMK IT wing, defends the strategy on the ground that it reflects a popular view of Stalin. "Not just AIADMK cadres, even the general public considers Stalin to be unfit for the Chief Ministerial post. This is evident from the fact that though we uploaded videos of his gaffes, it is the public that is making them," he claimed.
"The campaign against Stalin will continue."
The party will also be introducing new hashtags like "Kayavar TV" (AIADMK’s YouTube channel named mocking the DMK’s Kalaignar TV), "Arikkai Arumugam" (person who keeps making announcements) and "Whatsapp bench" to spread its messages against the DMK and Stalin.
Interestingly, the BJP claimed to have little to do with this campaign. “We have no specific role in this. But, it is common to retweet and share the messages of AIADMK and others if they are relevant to our party,” ANS Prasad, State BJP media president said.
However, DMK cadres claim to be unperturbed by such campaigns. Pudukkottai MM Abdulla, a state functionary of the DMK IT wing, said they were not any cause of concern to the party. “Such campaigns won't yield results.”
The party had done an internal assessment of this and found there was no harm caused to its leaders, he said. However, this suggests the DMK was concerned enough to run such an assessment. Nonetheless, Abdulla claimed that the people of TN had rejected such smear campaigns.
“A similar effort was made during the last parliamentary polls by the AIADMK-BJP alliance and they failed. The people know our leader Stalin’s capabilities. His track record as Chennai Mayor, municipal administration minister and deputy chief minister speaks volumes,” he said.
Some of Stalin's gaffes
While campaigning in 2019, he made mistakes in basic addition while telling an audience how many Assembly seats the party needed to take the House
He has frequently made mistakes in quoting famous Tamil adages in public meetings
He once mixed up the dates for Independence Day and Republic day