A courtroom chief minister: Vijay's government is being run from the litigation dock

On Monday, the Madras High Court heard the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu ask it to close the door on the people who question his election. On the same day, in the same building, two of his ministers learned that the opposition they govern over is suing them for Rs 1 crore, while one of them sues the opposition leader for the same sum. Somewhere in the middle of this paper war, a child sexual abuse case — the dispute that supposedly started it all — waits for its investigators to finish their work. C. Joseph Vijay came to power promising a clean break with the old politics of Tamil Nadu. The break lasted about as long as a court lunch. Four election petitions challenge his victories from Perambur and Tiruchi East — two constituencies with movable-asset declarations differing by over Rs 100 crore. The Chief Minister's response is not to face the petitions but to bury them: applications for outright rejection, at the threshold, without trial. A leader confident of his mandate would welcome the scrutiny. A leader confident of the court's indulgence asks for dismissal. The ministers, meanwhile, have converted governance into a libel exchange. Aadhav Arjuna told a September press meet that the DMK's tenure ran a "compromised police force" shielding industrialists and the "then ruling family". The DMK's answer is a Rs 1-crore suit, Google and Meta and X included for good measure. Arjuna's own Rs 1-crore suit against M.K. Stalin — over a party IT Wing post linking him to a Rs 258-crore drug trafficking case — awaits its October 26 hearing. Read the whole file and a pattern emerges: this government litigates the way it campaigned, with noise and counter-noise, while the actual work of the state proceeds by inertia. Periyar had a test for power: does it tolerate being questioned? The answer coming out of the Madras High Court this week is instructive. Election petitions exist precisely so that a victory can be examined; a Chief Minister who files to reject them at the threshold is telling the voter that the mandate is his property, not the people's trust. Defamation suits exist to protect reputation; a government that trades them by the crore is telling the citizen that reputation matters more than the POCSO victim whose case started the fight. The by-elections of October 6 were already engineered by defections; the Embraer-Mahindra jobs flew to Nagpur while Tamil Nadu's ministers were busy drafting pleadings. A year into its promise of change, the TVK government's signature achievement is a docket. Courts are where governments go when they have nothing left to say to the people. This one never leaves.