PTR eyes decisive hat-trick in Madurai Central: 'Aiming for 60 pc' | Interview

He is looking for his third consecutive win from Madurai Central constituency, and there is no dearth of confidence when he speaks about it. As Tamil Nadu inches closer to its Assembly elections on April 23, Dr Palanivel Thiaga Rajan gears up for the battle and places his chances of securing yet another major mandate on both his individual capacity and a bolstered alliance led by his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

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The Federal spoke with Thiaga Rajan, fondly called “PTR”, a former high-profile banker who is currently Tamil Nadu’s information technology minister and has been its finance minister in the past, for an exclusive interview on the sidelines of his campaign in the constituency.

While expressing a sense of confidence during the conversation, he dismissed the hype around optics, arguing that elections are ultimately decided by the “capacity to serve people”. Explaining it, he emphasised a rising vote share, a strengthened alliance, and a governance model built on compassion, data and execution.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

It’s an exciting contest in Madurai Central this time. It’s a former Wall Street banker (PTR) taking on a filmmaker (Sundar C, from Puthiya Nidhi Katchi). How optimistic are you?

I don't think it matters that I'm a former banker. It certainly doesn't matter that there's an actor or director. What matters is whether you have the capacity to serve the people, what your track record is, what your plans are, and how much of your track record is verifiable by external sources.

So, irrespective of who was going to be the candidate against me, I've said that I am supremely confident of getting more than 50 per cent vote share, not just confident of winning, for two reasons.

The first reason is that as we do work, people respect it, regard us more, and reward us. So I came as a new face to electoral politics in 2016 and got 43.4 per cent of the vote.

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After five years as an opposition MLA, and effectively doing the corporation councillor's work since there were no local body elections, I got 49.4 per cent of the vote. And after five years as a minister, and delivering [producing both] at the state, city, and constituency levels, in addition to my MLA work of street, home, and individual levels [benefits and outcomes], I am supremely confident that I would cross 50 per cent of the vote this time.

Every party has dynasts, every party has descendants, every party has husbands, every party has wives contesting, some of them in multiple party symbols. Some of them, like the husband, will be one party, the wife will be a second party, and the son will be a third party.

Second, our leader (Chief Minister M K Stalin) has forged such a formidable alliance that we now have, compared to the alliance in 2021, we now have three significant parties, as well as some factions of the All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which also holds some significance.

In that direction, I would say that having our friends—who represented MNM (Makkal Needhi Maiam) and secured 10 per cent of the vote (in Madurai Central in 2021), the DMDK (Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam), which had the sitting MLA here from 2011 to 2016, the SDPI (Social Democratic Party of India), whose candidate ran against me and got some vote share, along with O Panneerselvam, who has split from the AIADMK and joined us—only strengthens our position.

R Gopalakrishnan, who was brought in by Panneerselvam, is a former MP of Madurai. So, in essence, now we have former MP, a party that previously held the MLA’s seat, the DMDK, the SDPI and the MNM, besides factions of the AIADMK.

So if you add all that up, now my goal is no longer 50 per cent. I aim for a minimum of 55 per cent, while 60 per cent would be ideal.

Elections, political pundits say, are generally fought on two things—optics and arithmetic. At least on the face of it, actor and TVK leader Vijay appears to be winning the optics game. The crowd he draws and the energy within them are clearly visible during his Chennai campaign. Is the DMK unable to generate that kind of optics this time?

We are drawing as big or bigger crowds than we have drawn. Again, you know, I'm not commenting on things I see on TV, because I have no idea what is real and what is fake.

In my constituency, I would say that the welcome I'm receiving and the crowds that are coming to my campaigns this time are even greater than they were last time, which were even greater than they were the time before. So it's hard for me to talk about optics.

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I will say that clearly, if you're a popular actor entering into the fray, you're likely to get a lot of attention. I consider that a good thing. I'm not worried about it.

I think that more people should be engaged in the process. I have supreme confidence that voters will assess, particularly the women, who, I am sure, will assess who's likely to provide what benefit to whom.

Tamil Nadu keeps saying the Centre is gaming the state, on taxes, the governor, and NEET. Chief Minister Stalin is pitching this election as a battle between Tamil Nadu and Delhi. Do you think the average voter in Madurai Central will be voting with this in mind?

Yeah, I agree with that 100 per cent, but I'm saying we no longer have to talk about generic things or state-wide things. Just recently, we had Maharashtra’s chief minister (Devendra Fadnavis) come here and say that only if a BJP MLA and a BJP coalition government is formed in Tamil Nadu, Madurai will get a metro railway. How outrageous is that?

Therefore, it is very, very justified for the chief minister to first be outraged at that comment and say this is beyond the pale. Like I've been saying for a long time, no government in the history of India has weaponised people's money for political purposes as this government at the Centre, and now they're blatant about it. They're not saying it's based on qualification or population; they're saying if you have a BJP MLA or a BJP government, they will give you money. It's outrageous. Obviously, then we're going to say the fight is against the BJP and the NDA in Tamil Nadu.

You were vocal about rising debt during the former Edappadi K Palaniswami government. Now, your party’s manifesto expands welfare even as debt keeps rising. Is this economically calibrated or a political compulsion? And where do you draw the line?

Look, I have said before, all governments should be characterised by three variables. One, how much humanity, compassion, and empathy the leader and his government have. In that, I think it is very clear that our leader is very much focused on every single element of society, particularly those left behind. For example, we have special programmes for orphans, which we have never had in the history of the government before. So, the first quality is humanity, compassion, empathy.

The second variable is data. Again, I have pointed out many, many instances, because this started with me as finance minister, and now I am the IT minister. I am sitting on top of the entity that owns all the data. We have spectacularly good data, much better than we even dreamt we would have, much better than we have ever had, and much better than most governments of most states.

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For example, we were the first state to get the Union finance minister and the CBDT chairman to agree to connect an API with us so that we will have real-time income-tax filer data to know who the economic pyramid is at what level of the population. So, we now have better data.

The third thing I said was execution. The best example of execution skill, I would say, is what we did in the first two years after we came. When we came, we had made a lot of promises, and we fulfilled several of them, including Rs 4,000 per ration card, free bus, and waiver of the jewel loan.

We had to deal with costs and expenses we had not anticipated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That is why, when I gave my budget speech in 2023, the third one, following the amended budget for 2021-2022, and the full budget for 2022-2023, I said, in my estimation that we have spent Rs 1 lakh crore on new schemes and initiatives in the last two years and yet reduced the revenue deficit from Rs 62,000 crore to Rs 30,000 crore.

But the revenue deficit is currently at 1.6 per cent...

No, I am saying, it is doable. There is a track record of it being done. I say if you have execution capability, you can do anything. In fact, forget me, I am just a one-time minister, politician. The great economist John Maynard Keynes, the father of the Keynesian school of thought, in an interview with the BBC, during the depths of the Second World War, was asked, “How will we be able to kind of pay for all these things?” He said, “Listen, state finances are not like personal finances; states have inordinate resources.”

I have said it many times, for example, the state is the biggest owner of land. The state is sitting on thousands and thousands or tens of thousands or lakhs of crores of land, lakhs of acres and lakhs of crores of land. In Madurai alone, the government probably owns, I do not know, 300 acres of prime land. So states have infinite resources.

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So, what Keynes said, which I second, is that anything you can actually do, you can afford. So if you have the capacity to actually execute, you can find a way to finance it. That is not the biggest limitation of a government. I will just stop there.

Your grandfather was the chief minister (then first minister) of the Madras Presidency. Your father was Speaker of the Tamil Nadu Assembly. You are a minister. The opposition is going full throttle over the DMK being a party of dynasts, with reportedly 31 dynasts in the fray this time. Do you think that’s a disadvantage?

Look, if you want to go against hypocrisy, every party has dynasts, every party has descendants, every party has husbands, every party has wives contesting, some of them in multiple party symbols. Some of them, like the husband, will be one party, the wife will be a second party, and the son will be a third party. So I do not want to descend to this level of politics.

As far as I am concerned, I came to continue the good work of my forefathers. I came, sacrificing my personal career. I was a senior managing director in a large global bank, with millions of US dollars a year, and at a very low tax rate in Singapore. I sacrificed that to come, not because I am expecting any credit for that, but because my family's way of life was that we were, at least for hundreds of years, relatively wealthy by inheritance.

I wanted to be different, so I became wealthy on my own. But otherwise, the point was, once you have economic security, what do you do? And for a long time, we have followed the tradition of doing public service as our way of being grateful to God, because I am a believer, and the society in which we live. I came to do that work.

If anything, I will go the other way. When I came 10 years ago, I said I would be here for 10 years. I said I will come at 50, after I have achieved economic independence and protection for my family, and established my name as a professional, as a manager, as a patent holder, as an educated man.

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By that commitment, I should have retired and not run for this election (he is completing a decade in the Assembly this year). But in fact, the reason I am still running mostly is two things. One, I was not able to achieve everything I wanted to achieve. I have announced some things that turned out to be much more complex than I had thought, because I could not get the blueprints, for example, for the UGD (underground drainage) system, when I was in opposition. Only after I became minister could I access them, and they go back to 1908. So, I did not anticipate that the complexity would be this high.

The second thing is that people will not have good memories of me, as I leave the job half done. So I decided that leaving when you are successful, like I did in banking or consulting, is a different thing. Leaving when you have the job half done, I do not have such a track record in my life.

If DMK gets to win this election, should we expect PTR back in the saddle as the finance minister or IT minister?

I have no idea. If the DMK wins, I will be happy. The chief minister will decide who is a minister, who is what minister, and all that. I have nothing to do with that.