Chennai, Oct 15 Ruling TVK leader and Tamil Nadu minister Aadhav Arjuna has strongly criticised DMK chief M K Stalin, allegedly for “pretending” to oppose the SIR of electoral rolls and maintaining “deceptive silence” while “covertly collaborating” with the EC and Centre, in what he described as the “murder of democracy”.
He argued that although the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters’ roll was initiated by the Election Commission, the DMK was responsible for its full-scale implementation across every street and neighborhood in Tamil Nadu, a fact he challenged Stalin to deny, labeling the DMK chief as the “primary culprit”.
Arjuna, the TVK general secretary and PWD minister, alleged that during the SIR process, over 9.7 million voters were removed – specifically targeting youth under 30 and women – without any protest or official statement from the DMK. He noted that when irregularities emerged, his party, TVK, filed a case in the Supreme Court to have the process cancelled.
Stalin was now shedding “crocodile tears” over the situation, Arjuna said and asserted that the people of Tamil Nadu will not forgive the DMK for their role in what he described as a “betrayal of democracy.”
In a strongly worded statement on Wednesday, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam leader accused the former Chief Minister of projecting an image of opposing the Centre on state rights, but “secretly partnered” with the ruling BJP at the Centre and the Election Commission to execute the SIR exercise entirely under DMK control across Tamil Nadu.
According to TVK, during the SIR exercise conducted between October 27, 2025, and February 23, 2026, the state government machinery was deployed to serve ruling party interests. DMK allegedly deployed over seven lakh party functionaries – including 75,032 BLA2s and 5.50 lakh Booth Level Committee (BLC) members- financed through party funds to manage SIR operations on the ground.
Arjuna claimed that local DMK district secretaries and then ministers dictated the appointment of state government employees acting as BLOs, ensuring voter lists were directly handled by DMK union and branch secretaries. Arjuna pointed out that AIADMK General Secretary and then Leader of Opposition Edappadi K Palaniswami had also publicly alleged that the SIR exercise was being driven under DMK’s direct control rather than independent oversight.
Also, the minister alleged that DMK utilised a private firm to extract data from the Election Commission and state machinery, developing a specialised app to track voters on polling day.
Had the SIR exercise not stripped 74 lakh voters from the rolls, TVK would have secured over 160 seats instead of the 108 seats it won in the general assembly elections, leaving the DMK without even the position of principal opposition party, he claimed.
“People who were talking arrogance six months ago about winning 200 seats are now reduced to celebrating second place finish in the recent Maduranthakam and Dharapuram assembly by-elections. This is the democratic verdict delivered by the people of Tamil Nadu against the DMK,” Arjuna said in the statement.
He affirmed the party’s commitment to opposing the SIR process legally and politically, promising to expose the full extent of the alleged conspiracy with documentary evidence in due course to safeguard the democratic rights of Tamil Nadu’s voters.
(PTI News)
