Chennai: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Vijay may have star power, but his primary antagonist, DMK’s Udhayanidhi Stalin, has increasingly stolen the limelight. Even being detained for an allegedly “double meaning” remark about actor Trisha Krishnan, a close associate of Vijay, seems to have only accelerated his hammer-and-tongs approach.
Most of the high-decibel action currently flows from Tamil Nadu’s Cauvery water dispute with Karnataka. Leader of Opposition Udhayanidhi has repeatedly accused Vijay of playing soft on Karnataka’s proposed Mekedatu dam—an upstream project that Tamil Nadu fears could choke off vital river water to its downstream farmers.At a Cauvery protest rally in Thanjavur on Tuesday—where Udhayanidhi was rallying farmers against the state’s purported inaction—he allegedly made an ‘offensive’ remark when the crowd started chanting Trisha’s name. He was swiftly arrested and then released on station bail after hours of questioning. But immediately thereafter, he doubled down on his attack. Dismissing his arrest as a “comedy” engineered through “cut, copy, paste” video edits, he accused the TVK government of using police intimidation to distract from farmers’ demands and the state budget.
