Minister hits out at MP, deletes tweet

State Finance Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, who’s known for his acerbic remarks against political opponents, has stirred a new controversy by criticising one of his own.

After hitting out at state BJP leaders for hitting below the belt for his abstention from the recent GST council meeting last week, Thiaga Rajan on Thursday called out his own party MP TKS Elangovan for criticising him in public. Elangovan found fault with Finance Minister’s temperament in a TV interview and cautioned that the Minister was being watched by the Chief Minister.

Responding to it, Thiaga Rajan, without naming his party colleague, tweeted earlier in the day that an “old fool who was sacked from two party roles by two successive rulers gets conned into blabbering.” Though the Minister’s tweet has no direct reference to Elangovan, who was reprimanded and sacked from party posts during the presidentship of both Karunanidhi and Stalin, it was easily understood that the deleted tweet referred to the erstwhile organising secretary.

Curiously, the Minister pulled down the tweet from his social media handle after it evoked reaction from within the party.

More than his response, his “most accurate description” of the DMK leader as “can be bought for 2 kg of shrimp” had drawn the attention of critics, especially rival saffron camp which exploited it to draw Chief Minister MK Stalin’s attention to the same. A couple of days ago, another tweet of the minister caused Twitter outrage after he used a mental health condition to describe a BJP leader. DMK sympathizers on social media defended it by recalling earlier ‘unparliamentary’ and ‘obscene’ tweets of the BJP leaders.