CM Stalin distributes laptops to 136 tribal welfare school students
Taking to social media after the event, Stalin said he was elated that this is the first event he attended after being discharged from the hospital.
Stalin said he was moved by the stories of the students from underprivileged backgrounds, many of whom had overcome hardships to pursue education.
'It was heartening to hear about their educational journey and their passion for education,' he said.
'Tamil society should celebrate these students, who have become achievers through education and hardwork, as role models,' he stated.
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Indian Express
a few seconds ago
- Indian Express
Decode Politics: Under ED scanner, why TN Minister Periyasamy is key to DMK game plan in 2026 polls
While Tamil Nadu Rural Development Minister and senior DMK leader I Periyasamy, the 72-year-old strongman from Dindigul, has kept a low profile during the last four years of the M K Stalin-led party government in the state, he has come under the spotlight in recent days. What is the row? Last Saturday, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted searches at the premises of Periyasamy and his family members, including his son and DMK MLA I P Senthil Kumar, in Dindigul, his home turf, and Chennai. The ED's action was dubbed 'politically-motivated' by the DMK, which argued that it came just a few months after the BJP and the AIADMK formed their alliance for the state Assembly elections slated for April 2026. Top sources in the DMK government alleged that Periyasamy was raided by the ED as 'the AIADMK-BJP combine have decided to target the DMK strongmen who hold sway in districts and are critical to election funding and mobilisation for the party'. 'At least six DMK heavyweights, who are known to marshal resources at scale during campaigns, would be under watch in this regard,' a DMK minister claimed. Although Periyasamy has been a low-key DMK figure in the Stalin dispensation as compared to his stint during the period of the late party patriarch K Karunanidhi, he wields enormous clout in Dindigul which he has maintained for decades. He is known as one of the DMK's most rooted district satraps. The DMK camp pointed out that the ED's raids at the Periyasamy family's properties came just two days ahead of a hearing in the Supreme Court on a plea filed by them. On Monday, the Supreme Court stayed a Madras High Court's April order which revived a 2012 disproportionate assets case against Periyasamy, his wife, and two sons – including Senthil Kumar, the two-term DMK MLA from Dindigul's Palani – setting aside the 2017 discharge order of a trial court in the case. The ED however released a statement stating that there were seizures of documents and digital devices from its last week's raids at the Periyasamy family's premises and at Irulappa Mills India Pvt Ltd, a Dindigul-based company where Periyasamy and his younger son are directors. What are the cases? The legal cloud now hanging over Periyasamy involves two separate cases: one, a probe into the alleged illegal allotment of Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB) plots in 2008, and, two, the more recent disproportionate assets case that led to the ED's raids. First case The first case lodged against Periyasamy alleges that as the housing minister in 2008, he oversaw 'irregular' allotment of a high-income group plot by the TNHB to Ganesan, the personal security officer of the then chief minister Karunanidhi. The state government's Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC) registered the case against him in 2011, after the AIADMK swept to power under J Jayalalithaa. What followed was more than a decade of litigation. The then Assembly Speaker P Dhanapal granted sanction for Periyasamy's prosecution in 2012, which he contested while arguing that only the Governor could do so. His discharge plea was rejected by a trial court in 2016, which was upheld by both the Madras High Court and the Supreme Court in 2022. In March 2023, a special court discharged him in the matter. However, in April this year, high court judge Justice N Anand Venkatesh overturned Periyasamy's discharge, transferred the case to a special court for the MPs and MLAs, and ordered daily hearings with warnings of judicial custody if the accused delayed proceedings. 'The public must see that no one, however powerful, can escape trial,' the judge observed. Second case The second case against Periyasamy stems from a 2012 DVAC chargesheet that accused him and his family of amassing assets worth about Rs 2 crore, allegedly disproportionate to their known sources of income, during his tenure as the revenue and prisons minister. A special court in Dindigul had discharged him and his family, but the high court set aside the discharge in April 2025. The ED's weekend raids brought this case against the DMK minister back in focus. The agency officials alleged they uncovered 'paper (dummy) companies' linked to Irulappa Mills, indicating attempts at 'laundering funds'. While the investigation into the case has continued, the DMK renewed its charge that the central agencies were allegedly going after its leaders at the behest of the BJP-led Centre. What is Periyasamy's salience? In the 2021 Assembly elections, Periyasamy garnered the largest winning margin in the state, 135,571 votes, to retain his Athoor seat in Dindigul. In the 2011 polls, when the DMK was routed across the state, finishing with just 23 of 234 seats, he still managed to win Athoor by about 54,000 votes. Only the then incumbent CM Karunanidhi had a similar winning margin among the party MLAs – clinching his Tiruvarur seat by over 50,000 votes – as the party was decimated in the wake of the 2G spectrum scam. DMK sources said Periyasamy's dominance in Dindigul 'powers the party to pick at least four seats' in the region. In the rough and tumble of Tamil Nadu politics, this makes him crucial for the DMK: a 'votebank custodian' in a region where the BJP has been attempting social engineering for about a decade. He also belongs to the dominant Thevar (OBC) community. And yet, despite his political heft, Periyasamy has largely avoided the limelight during the Stalin regime. Unlike other ministers, he has seldom been the public face of the government. Those close to him describe him as a 'cautious leader shaped by years of legal battles and by his district-first instincts'. DMK ministers under scanner Several DMK ministers have faced raids by the central agencies in connection with various cases – mostly in the first year of the party-led government – who include Stalin's close aide and minister EV Velu, then minister K Ponmudy, party heavyweight K Senthil Balaji, and party veteran S Jagathrakshakan. Balaji, an accused in a cash-for-jobs scam, had been in prison for about 14 months. In these cases, the DMK has accused the BJP of allegedly 'leaning' on the central agencies to weaken its satraps. 'Our fear has not been conviction but disruption: senior ministers tied up in hearings, raids, and bail pleas; cadres demoralised by headlines; CM Stalin's attention diverted,' a DMK insider said. A senior DMK minister alleged, 'These cases are meant to diminish DMK's influence, not necessarily to secure convictions.' DMK spokesperson TKS Elangovan had said earlier, 'Those aligning with the NDA are spared (from these raids), those opposing it are not.' On its part, the BJP has refuted such allegations, maintaining that the agencies work independently as per the law. For Stalin, the challenge has also been about balancing optics with loyalty. Removing Balaji from his Cabinet was politically untenable for the DMK in Karur. Similarly, sidelining Periyasamy may spark a blowback for the party in Dindigul.
Indian Express
2 hours ago
- Indian Express
Ports, polities, and partnerships: The history of India-Philippines ties
Given the recent camaraderie between the governments of India and the Philippines, a short history of their ties is in order. A cautious long-term approach suggests that there are four kinds of historical evidence — inscriptions and chronicles, archaeological findings, texts and performing genres, and secondary historiographical syntheses — that inform the historiography in question. Romantic narratives of civilisational unity between the two polities are exaggerated. However, there are concrete grounds to observe how India and the Philippines are natural partners on the cultural and maritime frontiers. The 11th-century Chola naval operations remain a touchstone for debates on South Asian history and ancient India's maritime expanse. According to Tamil inscriptions, Chola naval campaigns struck at ports of the Srivijaya Empire (Sumatra and parts of the Malay Archipelago). The Tirukkadaiyur inscription and related archaeological materials convey ships, gates, and booty as measures of Chola success in Southeast Asia. Historians of Southeast Asian maritime polities tell us that political sovereignty in the region was often thalassocratic — organised around ports rather than contiguous land empires. Historian Hermann Kulke emphasises Srivijaya's role as a maritime mandala that mediated Indian cultural forms to islands further east. India's Southeast Asian influence cannot be articulated without recapitulating the journeys of a diaspora of Indo-Southeast Asian merchants and priestly travellers who transmitted Sanskrit vocabulary and ritual artefacts into the Malay Archipelago. Seen thus, the Chola expedition was a chapter in a much longer history of maritime diplomacy and cultural exchanges between India and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, India's Coromandel ports became integrated into an eastern Indian Ocean circuit that reached the Strait of Malacca. Subsequently, this undergirded exchanges with the Philippines. This circuit, for understandable reasons, is of special interest to history enthusiasts. This is particularly true for those with a fancy for a Greater-India-narrative. However, it needs to be framed within a broader maritime zeitgeist that unfolded around maritime Srivijaya (the 7th-13th-century Indonesian Empire) and Majapahit (the 13th-early-16th-century Hindu-Buddhist Javanese Empire). A deeper understanding of India's long-distance contacts with Southeast Asia can help achieve far greater, sophisticated cultural cooperation under India's Act East policy. The Philippines' ostensible lack of monumental Hindu-Buddhist temple complexes — which are otherwise conspicuous in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand — leads one to often underestimate Indianate ties to the Philippine archipelago. According to Filipino scholar Joefe B. Santarita, India-Philippines contacts are embodied in smaller, more mobile cultural forms, like texts, dance forms, vocabulary, and portable artefacts. Intangible (fables, dances, lexicon) and tangible (icons, pendants, stamps, beads) relics from this heritage constitute a composite index of precolonial India-Philippines connectivity. On the textual and performative side, there is the indomitable Maharadia Lawana, the Maranao variant of the Ramayana canon of epics found in Southeast Asia. As the Filipino linguist Juan R. Francisco's fieldwork has shown, Maharadia Lawana condenses the Ramayana into a sequence of episodes that correspond roughly to canonical kandas (Balakanda, Aranyakanda, Kiskindhakanda, Sundarakanda and Yuddakanda). The core narrative frames of the Ramayana still survive in Filipino cultural memory, except for original locations and subtexts that metamorphose in the light of local habitats, altered episodes, and historically distinct moral emphases. Scholars agree that the Filipino Maharadia Lawana is an indigenised Ramayana mutant of the original Indian epic authored by sage Valmiki, absorbed through Malay-Javanese channels rather than Indian cultural supremacy over the island nation. The Darangen of the Maranao is a Filipino archive of epic memory that complements Maharadia Lawana. The Darangen is an extensive oral epic — some 25 narrative chapters — whose principal hero, Bantugen, and episodes such as 'The Abduction of Princes Lawanen' mirror structural motifs of the Ramayana, interweaving tropes of martial romance, supernatural agencies, and localised cosmologies, with accretions from Islamic elements layered onto a pre-Islamic core. The Darangen is not merely a repository of remote memory but a lived moral archive, whose codification is recited in households, and whose episodes shape communal ideals and social conduct, further demonstrating how Philippine epic adaptations conserve Indianate narrative and performative structures within local idioms. The Filipino theatre tradition has repeatedly drawn on Maharadia Lawana and related materials, and modern productions and adaptations use these narratives to explore identity and history under changing political conditions. Performance and community rituals thus act as living archives of shared narrative structures and social memory shared between the two sovereign nation-states. Similarly, another vector of cultural transmission — dance performances — is seen in the Maranao Singkil dance. The dance form's choreographic grammar — the step patterns across crossed bamboo poles, the role of the principal dancer (Princess Gandingan), the parasol and the accompanying gong and kulintang ensemble — reflect a larger Southeast Asian performance repertoire with formal affinities to Indian dance traditions. Interestingly, a comparative study of Orissan art underscores the point that there are formal affinities in sculptural motifs, bead-types, and other small finds that travel with merchants and pilgrims from Kalinga/Orissa into Malay and Indonesian contexts. These correspondences make it plausible that similar material currents reached the Philippine islands through intermediary ports. This does not itself suggest a literal borrowing of styles of Indian dance forms; rather, the bodily gestures, hand positions, and embodied narrative techniques of Singkil point to enduring stylistic diffusions caused by Srivijayan and Majapahit cultural circulations. There is also a wealth of Sanskrit loanwords across Philippine languages — almost 340 Sanskrit-derived items exist in Philippine vocabularies, about half of which have demonstrable Sanskrit provenance. Examples of this include guro (teacher), saksi (witness), and dukha (sorrow), which have been handed down through sustained lexical transmission across centuries, typically dating to a period between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, mediated through Malay and Javanese intermediaries who had links with the Coromandel coast. Besides these, there are portable objects discovered from the Philippines whose typology and historical contexts point to Indianate circuits. The Agusan gold 'Vajralasya' Tara (found in the Agusan River and now in the Field Museum, Chicago), a clay votive stamp from Calatagan depicting Avalokitesvara/Padmapani in tribhanga pose (14th-15th c.), the Golden Garuda pendant from Palawan (linked stylistically to the Majapahit corpus), and a variety of Indo-Pacific trade beads find worthy mentions in this list. These material nodes confirm maritime networks linking the Philippine littoral to eastern Indian Ocean commerce through Indonesian and Malayan merchants. Imported images, beads and textiles served as prestige objects in precolonial Philippine polities, circulating in elite gift networks and funerary contexts to acquire social values transcending mere commerce. So, instead of material legacies being enshrined as temple complexes, Indo-Philippine cultural transactions were embodied as portable, high-value objects in elite contexts. This signals a difference in the political ecology of the Indo-Philippine heritage within the larger heritage of Indo-Southeast Asian cultural memories, but surely not the cultural isolation of this trajectory of transactions. There is a strong practical counterpart to this historical context. As contemporary Filipino scholars like Santarita believe, Indian culture may not have been the sole driver of the modernisation in the transition of Southeast Asian chiefdoms to kingdoms, but Indian notions of kingship and allied cultural beliefs and rituals influenced the metamorphosis of chiefs into rajas and maharajas in the Malay Archipelago — even in precolonial Philippines. Since India-Philippines historic ties are empirically accessible, the prospect of institutions to reactivate bilateral cultural legacies is unignorable. Considering that discoveries of India-Philippines transactions are portable and perishable — instead of being monumental temple complexes — these dispersed traces all the more need conversion into durable institutional ties. Collaborative maritime-archaeology programmes between Indian and Philippine institutions can better preserve discoveries (like beads and ceramics found in the Bay of Bengal-Malacca Straits axis) and test hypotheses about their circulation and chronology, drawing from experts in this area. Objects such as the Agusan Tara or the Calatagan stamp can become pedagogic tools for exhibitions with layered histories of mediation by Malay and Javanese intermediaries. The Filipino critic and cultural commentator, Nicanor G. Tiongson, hints at the possibility of comparative philological projects to document continuities and divergences between Singkil, Darangen, and South Indian linguistic, narrative, and dance repertoires. As he adds, Lord Ram's 'quest for enlightened leadership is the region's quest for enlightened nationhood.' Meanwhile, historian Daniel G.E. Hall's reminder about Southeast Asian historical autonomy is salutary here, in that Indo-Southeast Asian contacts did not necessarily equal political subordination, and local agencies always had the autonomy to negotiate with incoming elements. Nonetheless, a provisional frame labelled the 'Chola Network' can be useful — provided it is used carefully as a heuristic rather than as a celebratory genealogy. The phrase captures important structural features documented in the sources: coastal polity-formation and sustained littoral orientation on the Coromandel and Andhra-Kalinga tracts, episodic projection of naval force and symbolic ritual, resident Tamil mercantile diasporas attested in inscriptions, and a Srivijayan thalassocratic matrix that mediated cultural flows across the Straits of Malacca. In practice, the 'Chola Network' might serve as a policy metaphor to frame institution-building along historically plausible lines, if cautiously embedded in peer-reviewed research, transparent pedagogy, and multilateral frameworks. Chakravarti, R. (2011, January). Sectional President's Address: The Pull Towards the Coast: Politics and Polity in India (C. 600-1300 CE). In Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (Vol. 72, pp. 22-42). Indian History Congress. Christie, J.W. (1998). The medieval Tamil-language inscriptions in Southeast Asia and China. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 29(2), 239-268. Fernandez, D.G. (1995). The playbill after 1983: Philippine theatre after Martial Law. Asian Theatre Journal, 12(1), 104-118. Francisco, J.R. (1989). The Indigenization of the Rama Story in the Philippines. Philippine studies, 101-111. Ghosh, A. (1992, January). The Gangetic Campaign by the Cholas (11th Century). In Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (Vol. 53, pp. 79-86). Indian History Congress. Hall, D.G.E. (1973). The integrity of Southeast Asian history. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 4(2), 159-168. Herujiyanto, L.H.N. (2024, January). Maharadia Lawana: The Indigenous Filipino 'Ramayana' by Way of Diaspora and. In Proceedings of the Critical Island Studies 2023 Conference (CISC 2023) (Vol. 818, p. 33-39). Springer Nature. Kulke, H. (2016). Śrīvijaya Revisited: Reflections on State Formation of a Southeast Asian Thalassocracy. Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, 102, 45-96. Mishra, P.P. (2000, January). Orissan Art in Island Southeast Asia: A Case Study of Cultural Interaction. In Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (Vol. 61, pp. 1062-1070). Indian History Congress. Saber, M. (1961). Darangen: The epic of the Maranaws. Philippine Sociological Review, 9(1/2), 42-46. Santarita, J. B. (2018). Panyupayana: The emergence of hindu polities in the pre-islamic Philippines. In Shyam Saran (ed.), Cultural and civilisational links between India and Southeast Asia: Historical and contemporary dimensions (pp. 93-105). Singapore: Springer. Santarita, J. B. (2023). Enhancing India-Philippines Cooperation in Culture. Act East: Asean-India Shared Cultural Heritage. New Delhi: Research and information System for Developing Countries, 209-222. Spencer, G. W. (1976). The politics of plunder: The Cholas in eleventh-century Ceylon. The Journal of Asian Studies, 35(3), 405-419. Tiongson, N.G. (2019). Transforming Tradition in the Dance Drama Realizing Rama, 1997-2004: Documenting the Process of 'Inter-Creation' in an ASEAN Production. Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia, 9(2), 3-28.
Time of India
3 hours ago
- Time of India
Why does Xi Jinping keep purging loyalists? Look to Stalin and Mao for the answer
Live Events (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel No matter what Americans think of their politics, the United States still operates in the open. When the most powerful politician and the richest businessman fell out, the public got the full spectacle: barbed posts on social media and sniping in is the opposite. The country still doesn't know why former President Hu Jintao was abruptly escorted out of the 2022 Communist Party congress, or what really happened when former Premier Li Keqiang died at 68 in 2023. And decades later, the full story of Lin Biao, Mao Zedong's chosen successor, who fled China and died in a plane crash in 1971, is still secrecy has spawned a niche industry of "bedside eavesdroppers" -- Chinese online commentators who parse rumors and fleeting clues for signs of political shifts. Their YouTube videos dissect the gait, complexion or media appearances of China's leader, Xi Jinping , and can draw millions of views from outside the country's internet bedside eavesdroppers have had a busy summer. Xi has purged a number of military and political leaders this year, all of whom he had appointed. The eavesdroppers have contrived a timeline of Xi's exit, a combative meeting between Xi's bloc and that of the party elders and even the military's secret plan to topple his rule. The chatter was joined by American voices: a former U.S. national security adviser, a former diplomat and Washington think tanks that suggested there was a fracture in his power structure. Political risk consultancies and investment funds rushed to brief clients: Why is Xi doing this? Does it signal strength or weakness?Chinese politics remains a black box, and few credible observers are willing to be seen as indulging in rumor. Yet the questions themselves are legitimate. And they have deep historical purges follow in the tradition of Josef Stalin and Mao, and they serve as tools to discipline the elite and cement the absolute authority of one man. The campaign by Xi, who rose to the top over 12 years ago, underscores the difficulty of managing a vast system, even for a leader with seemingly unchallenged power. The feverish rumor mill may be a symptom of growing tension between Xi and the Communist Party the 1930s, Stalin's Great Purge eliminated 70% of the Soviet Communist Party 's Central Committee and more than half of the 1,966 delegates to its 1934 congress. Vast swaths of the Soviet military leadership were executed."This is one of the most amazing things of communism -- that it kills its own loyalists," said Stephen Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two volumes of a planned three-book Stalin biography. "People who don't waver in their loyalty are nonetheless targeted by the regime in its paranoia and its paroxysms."Nearly a century later, Xi's campaign is neither as sweeping nor as bloody, but it's the most far-reaching since the Cultural Revolution, when Mao sidelined or destroyed most of his top lieutenants, including Deng Xiaoping and Xi's own father, Xi 2024, the Communist Party disciplined 889,000 members, including 73 at or above the provincial or ministerial level, according to official statistics. Since late 2022, about 10% of the party's Central Committee, its top decision-making body, has been purged, sidelined or conspicuously absent from key meetings, Stanford political scientist Wu Guoguang military has been hit the hardest. At least 45 officials in the People's Liberation Army and China's military-industrial complex have been removed since 2023, according to the Jamestown Foundation. Two defense ministers were charged, on the same day in 2024, with corruption and with deeds that amounted to a betrayal of Xi of this came after Xi secured a third term in 2022 and filled the leadership ranks with his allies. Why can't he stop?Paranoia is a main driver. In authoritarian regimes, control over military and security forces is existential, said Kotkin at Hoover, but even loyalists develop their own interests and networks, posing risks for the leader. Xi, like other strongmen, faces the immense challenge of controlling a vast system that far exceeds the reach of his personal network, Kotkin said. Xi has had to reshuffle and purge and pit officials against one another and manipulate rivalries."My point is not that Xi Jinping is in trouble," Kotkin said. Rather, it's about the difficulties anyone would have managing such a big of Stanford sees a recurring cycle in Stalin, Mao and now Xi: Political purges follow governance failures and further centralize power. Stalin's Great Purge followed a horrifying famine that his policies helped cause. Mao's Cultural Revolution came after China's own Great Famine, which was a result of his disastrous decisions. Xi's current campaign follows the "zero COVID" debacles, regressive economic measures and contentious foreign policy moves."There is a spiraling, mutually reinforcing relationship between highly centralized power and governance disasters," Wu said. "The key link between governance failures and a dictator's further consolidation of power is the purge."In other words, the worse the governance, the greater the purge; and the greater the purge, the tighter the grip. Wu calls that cycle the "Stalin logic."One distinction between Stalin's rule and Xi's is that the vast majority of Russians under Stalin, out of both fear and conviction, believed that he was protecting his country and upholding communism. The same can be said about Mao, but probably not one is predicting the demise of Xi's rule. But the speculation about his grip on power may be a sign of deepening tensions between him and the Communist Party elites tolerated Xi as he consolidated power through anti-corruption campaigns, revised the constitution to eliminate term limits and cracked down on the private sector, said Cai Xia, a retired professor at the Central Party School who has become a party critic. They stayed silent because he didn't touch their privileges, she now his purges and China's economic problems are hitting closer to home. "If this continues, it could lead the party elites to believe that it won't be Xi who falls, but the party itself," Cai could rule for another decade or two, if his health permits, but only if he maintains the loyalty of the party's leaders. "One of the great vulnerabilities of the regime is when the elite begins to have doubts," Kotkin CIA sees potential cracks it is trying to exploit. In May, it released two Mandarin recruitment videos aimed at Chinese officials."As I climbed the ranks within the party, I watched my higher-ups fall suddenly into disgrace," one fictional party official narrates. "Now I realized my destiny is just as precarious as theirs."Recruitment is not really the point. The U.S. government is trying to convey a message that it believes there is disaffection in elite not clear how effective Xi's purges will be, though there is no end in sight."Xi Jinping's new model of totalitarianism clashes with the crony-capitalist model favored by CCP elites under his two predecessors, Jiang Zeming and Hu Jintao," Wu of Stanford added, "This is not a conflict that Xi can resolve simply by replacing 1,000, 2,000 or even 10,000 cadres."Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economic Times.
