The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) came to power in April 2021 in Tamil Nadu, after decades of alternating rule between the state’s two dominant Dravidian parties. Power has long shifted between them through cycles of anti-incumbency, within what has remained an effectively binary political field. The AIADMK’s two consecutive terms from 2011 to 2021 only intensified that cycle.
DMK’s return to power in 2021 was anchored in promises of social justice, shaped by the aftermath of some of the most egregious instances of state violence in the preceding regime, including the 2018 Thoothukudi Sterlite killings and the dual custodial deaths in Sathankulam. These incidents came to define public memory and the terms on which power was judged, placing questions of justice and police accountability at the centre of political discourse. In the period following the passing of both the parties’ long-standing leaders, M.K. Stalin’s emergence was framed through a social justice model, and an avowed ‘anti-fascist’ stance positioned in opposition to the BJP, with a focus on protecting religious minorities.
Five years on, this moment calls for a look back at the “social justice model” and a reconsideration of how far DMK’s promises have been met, as Tamil Nadu approaches another election. What is at stake is not merely a retrospective of governance, but how promises and political responses have persisted or receded in public memory.
In March 2026, nearly six years after the Sathankulam incident, a CBI court in Madurai convicted nine police personnel for the custodial killings of the father-son duo. At first glance, this appears to fulfil the promise of justice that had come to define the political moment. Yet, in the last two months alone, four custodial deaths have been reported in Tamil Nadu, all involving Dalit victims, revealing a pattern that has recurred with disturbing regularity over the past five years, alongside a rise in extrajudicial killings. This is not an isolated contradiction, nor is it confined to custodial violence.
The vocabulary of the social justice model and its Periyarist grounding are often articulated through commitments to anti-caste politics, minority protection, women's empowerment, labour rights, and criminal justice. It is against this framework that these promises must be located. The prolonged protests of sanitation workers against the privatisation of their work make this contradiction visible. Though several zones of solid waste management had already been outsourced to private firms under the previous regime, the DMK, while in opposition, had called for the regularisation of these workers and the guarantee of minimum wages.
After coming to power, however, the present government went ahead with further outsourcing, prompting sustained protests from workers who had been promised otherwise.
Besides, these protests, largely being led by women workers from the Dalit communities, were met with police clampdowns and a marked reluctance to engage in dialogue. Reports of manhandling, arbitrary detentions, and allegations of sexual harassment by police further shaped the course of these mobilisations. What unfolded before the Rippon Building was not simply a labour dispute, but a pattern of state repression in how demands from the most marginalised are suppressed.
In cases of caste-based violence in the last five years, the response is marked by denial, dilution, and calibrated inaction. There is a recurring refusal to acknowledge the role of caste, seen in the recent case of violence in Nanguneri, which was reframed as an isolated, personal dispute. This dilutes caste accountability and enables impunity.
Tamil Nadu has also reported the highest number of deaths of sanitation workers in the country, with workers dying in septic tanks and sewer lines despite legal prohibitions and safeguards in place. The state’s continued non-enforcement sits uneasily with the social justice claims on which the government came to power. The same pattern extends to honour killings. From earlier cases to the recent murder of Dalit youth Kavin Selvaganesh, these crimes persist despite the Madras High Court’s directions to set up district-level special cells to combat the growing evil of honour killings. These directives remain unimplemented, reflecting sustained neglect and a lack of political will.
What follows is not merely an absence of justice, but its sustained denial, where dominant caste perpetrators are afforded impunity, and the responses are shaped to ensure that existing caste hierarchies remain undisturbed. This cannot be seen in isolation from the political landscape of Tamil Nadu, where the consolidation of dominant caste and OBC support has long shaped electoral strategy.
For parties that invoke the language of anti-caste social justice, this reveals a deeper contradiction, where the political response to caste violence is shaped not so much by law or principle as by the calculations of retaining and consolidating these social blocs. This political logic is not unique to the Dravidian parties. Comparable patterns can be seen in how the BJP operates in relation to violence against Muslims and other religious minorities, where the deliberate exclusion and violation of minority rights are embedded within a broader ideological project of majoritarian consolidation, serving to mobilise electoral support.
Within Tamil Nadu itself, this contradiction is stark in the handling of the Thiruparankundram hill issue, where longstanding Muslim practices were curtailed overnight. However, the Stalin government’s response focused on containment rather than safeguarding the rights of minorities, fell short of its professed anti-fascist stance, allowing the issue to be shaped by majoritarian mobilisation.
These events are actively erased from public, collective memory. What is foregrounded before elections is not the past, nor the future, but the immediacy of welfare announcements, cash transfers, and targeted schemes that come to define the electoral moment.
This is not to deny the material value of such schemes. For many working-class women, they do enable a degree of financial independence and economic identity. But through the course of electoral politics, they cannot be allowed to overshadow the patterns of state repression and injustice that those in power perpetuate.
In doing so, what is pushed out of view are the “in-betweens”: what unfolds between electoral cycles, the lives lost to custodial torture and extrajudicial killings, state-enabled impunity in caste violence, repeated instances of sexual violence against women where perpetrators are shielded through political patronage, and the refusal to engage with people’s demands despite months of sustained protest. Across decades of anti-incumbency and alternating rule, these have continued to shape life, livelihood, and dignity, far more than any short-term benefits or cash transfers.
It is not merely a question of failure or inefficiency in governance; it is the absence of political will, rooted in a deeper ideological corruption.
In this sense, forgetting is not incidental, but produced. Acts of impunity, violence and complicity across political formations are pushed out of public memory, reshaping what is taken into account when power is judged.
The threat of erasure is more starkly visible this year within the electoral process itself, with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Tamil Nadu resulting in the deletion of over 74 lakh voters from the rolls. The opacity surrounding the process has left large sections of voters confused and anxious, and places the burden of proof on citizens, disproportionately affecting marginalised communities and leading to their disenfranchisement. Although the ruling party opposed the SIR, the outcome remained unchanged, failing short of its professed anti-BJP stance as exclusionary processes shaped by majoritarian political agendas continued unchecked.
The role of smaller parties and coalition partners further complicates this landscape, but only up to a point. Interventions, whether in labour struggles such as the Samsung workers’ protest, or in sustained pressure for a separate law against caste violence by parties like the CPI(M) and VCK, do point to a distinct ideological position within the coalition. Yet, their limited electoral weight ensures that these positions rarely carry into sustained action or shape the terms on which power is exercised. At the same time, alliances built through caste or majoritarian appeals, as seen with parties like the PMK or BJP, demonstrate how political choices are shaped by the need to consolidate these vote bases even when this comes at the cost of enabling violence, impunity, and the denial of rights.
This is not a question of which party appears more promising, but of what is actively erased as Tamil Nadu approaches the Assembly polls. What remains at stake is not the promises made in the immediacy of elections, but the continued presence of state violence against marginalised communities, the lack of accountability and the impunity afforded to those responsible, and a persistent unwillingness to confront these injustices where doing so would unsettle entrenched social and political interests. What is erased from public memory does not disappear; it continues to determine whose lives are protected, and whose are rendered expendable.
Madhura SB is a lawyer practising in the Madras High Court.
Edgar is a human rights lawyer currently pursuing an L.L.M. in European and International Human Rights Law at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Views expressed are the authors’ own.