Kamal Haasan visits a flower market in Coimbatore during an election campaign tour (Archive)
Coimbatore / Chennai:
Long before the Tamil Nadu election date was announced, it was speculated that actor and politician Kamal Haasan would compete in a Chennai constituency where his party, the Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM), did well in the elections. of Lok Sabha 2019.
Velachery and Mylapore seats are among those mentioned.
However, Kamal Haasan has chosen to look west, concentrating on Coimbatore (south), where he will face Vanathi Srinivasan from the BJP and MS Jayakumar from Congress in a high-profile contest.
Why did Kamal Haasan choose Coimbatore? One reason was that R Mahendran, the vice president of his party, garnered 23,838 votes while contesting the Coimbatore Lok Sabha seat.
However, settling in the southern city is not without its challenges. The most notable of these challenges is having to fight the label of ‘outsider’, especially since Vanathi Srinivasan wears the label of ‘Kovai’s soil daughter’ proudly on his sleeve.
Nor has he missed the opportunity to rub it.
Over the weekend, when Kamal Haasan injured his foot (which recently had surgery and then reportedly stepped on a fan during a campaign event) and had to be hospitalized, she sent him a fruit basket to wish him a speedy recovery.
“It is our custom to take care of guests. We wish you good health as you are our guest,” he said.
Kamal Haasan responded by saying that he is not a stranger, but an Indian.
“Gandhiji is not Gujarati. He is my father,” he said, before striking out, “What about the stranger who keeps entering Tamil Nadu despite the shouts of ‘come back’.”
He was referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose visits to Tamil Nadu often see #GoBackModi on social media.
Meanwhile, Kamal Haasan’s MNM cadre has noted that in ‘Sathi Leelavati’, one of the actor’s celebrated hits, he played the role of an orthopedic surgeon from Coimbatore.
They also pointed out that for an actor who has worked on films from different parts of the country and in different languages, wearing a straitjacket and confining him to a particular city or region is unfair.
If Kamal Haasan doesn’t prove success in this debut election, it could be a major setback for his party’s future political prospects.
Congress will need DMK’s support to ensure that neither Kamal nor ‘kamal‘(the lotus, the symbol of the BJP) blooms in Coimbatore (South).
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