The file is closed; the question is not: what the Vijayabaskar case says about power and justice

The Madras High Court has closed the plea arising from the ₹4-crore fraud complaint against C. Vijayabaskar, the TVK executive and former minister, after the police reported that no prima facie case was made out against him. That is the legal fact of the matter, and in a republic governed by the rule of law, the legal fact must be respected.

But the political question does not close with the file.

In Tamil Nadu's political memory, the "washing machine" jibe — that the taint of corruption gets laundered the moment a leader joins the ruling dispensation — did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a pattern that citizens have watched, election after election, government after government: cases against the powerful that slow down, soften, or quietly vanish once the political equations change. The comment sections greeting Thursday's order show how deeply that suspicion now runs.

Let us be precise about what is being asked. No one is entitled to declare a man guilty after a court has closed the plea against him. The question is institutional, not personal: would the same complaint, against a leader of the opposition, have travelled at the same speed and ended at the same destination? A justice system that cannot answer that question convincingly has a legitimacy problem, whatever any single order says.

This is where Periyar's rationalism still bites. Do not ask who benefits; ask what the pattern is. When investigation agencies report "no prima facie case" against ruling-party figures with metronomic regularity while opposition leaders spend years trapped in the slow grind of the same machinery, the rationalist does not need a conspiracy theory. The asymmetry is the evidence.

The TVK government came to power promising a clean break from the old politics of Tamil Nadu. It will not be judged by the cases its leaders escape. It will be judged by the standard it sets: investigations free of political interference, agencies that treat the ruling camp and the opposition with the same yardstick, and a police force whose findings the public can trust without having to take anyone's word for it. The file on C. Vijayabaskar is closed. The question — whether power in Tamil Nadu still decides what justice looks like — remains open. The washing machine only stops spinning when citizens refuse to look away.