He is barely into his workplace as Finance Minister for Tamil Nadu however PTRP Thiagarajan is already giving it a burnish and motion bias. Thiagarajan, the profitable Wall Street veteran whose household identify resonates with the southern temple metropolis Madurai, is taking up state coffers at a time funds have been clobbered by the coronavirus and cleaned by weak shopper sentiment. Thiagajaran wastes no time in asserting he’ll convey out a white paper on the state of funds and debt, and drive efforts in the direction of Covid-19 aid, mixing political verve and pragmatism at one stroke.
For a state finance minister, Thiagarajan is beginning his inning in a usually swashbuckling vogue. Then once more, he has typically carried out issues that adhere to the break-the-mould sort. He didn’t present it however his entry into energetic politics itself should have been a tough touchdown.
The milieu was the run-up to the Tamil Nadu Assembly polls of 2016, which means the DMK was baring its fangs in its ferocity to get again to energy after 5 years of rule by J Jayalalithaa. Alternating between the DMK and the AIADMK has been the state citizens’s oscillatory equation with the Dravidian events and, Thiagarajan entered the fray at a time the DMK was strident in its try to win again energy.
An funding banker whose tryst with politics has been meagre in comparison with a whirlwind profession that includes stints with Wall Street biggies together with Lehman, Thiagarajan pitted himself in the dusty political bylanes of Madurai in Southern Tamil Nadu. He was the son of the soil returning after a very long time; the tagline with which he approached the citizens was Meendum PTR (PTR Again) hanging on the recall worth of his late father Palanivel Rajan, who had been the Speaker in the state Assembly earlier than.
Thiagarajan had made it into the Assembly however his get together misplaced the election. It was a valiantly fought election however alliances ran in opposition to the DMK’s favour, resulting in a powerful opposition however a uncommon second time period for Jayalalithaa. For Thiagarajan, being a funding banker, and having gone to colleges just like the MIT Sloan college of administration, attempting out new ventures should have been second nature, for he dived deep into the rabbit gap of political social media with out a lot ado or want for inspiration—the anti-BJP voices have been turning strident, and the Jallikattu protests of early 2017, the string of different demonstrations from Neduvasal/Kathiramangalam anti-hydrocarbon extraction to the violent Sterlite Copper protests, all of which appeared like fodder for the DMK to feed the mandatory sentiment into the individuals.
The DMK IT wing was one of the vital essential arsenals over the past 4 years no less than. It reached super-significance across the Parliamentary Elections of 2019, when the DMK successfully utilized the equipment to whip up anti-BJP sentiment in the state. The DMK’s leverage of the social media platform is a research in itself, one thing that Thiagarajan would attribute to collective crew effort, and the general sentiment of a state which had a pliant authorities.
Born right into a political household that had seen the zenith—his grandfather PT Rajan was Chief Minister of pre-independence Madras—practically a century in the past, Thiagarajan has had deep connections with the temple circuit of Madurai. It would suffice to say that his household was instrumental in the conduct of the most-important competition on the Madurai Meenakshi Amman temple.
Of course, Thiagarajan is understandably uninterested in the beaten-to-death query: how can or not it’s that his religiosity and temple affinities go hand in hand with the DMK. Should Thiagarajan reply eloquently, he would quote Arignar Anna (CN Annadurai, founder-DMK) as the reply: “Let us not break idols of god, nor coconuts as choices to God.
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