Mersal is slum-slang signifying nothing. The Tamil film called Mersal starring upcoming star Vijay is, like most films, a work of fiction. It was cleared by the regional censor board packed with nominees of the BJP with MM Methiazhagan as the chief. He said there was nothing controversial in the dialogue or in the visuals. Vishal, producer of Mersal, fully cooperated with the censor board and deleted some shots considered ‘objectionable’ by some members. They did not consider the dialogue about the Goods and Services Tax or Digital India critical of the government.

Sri Lankan superstar turned politician Ranjan Ramanayke commended every politician, medical practitioner and student to watch Mersal. The BJP bigwigs in Tamil Nadu, however, feel otherwise. At their behest, Income Tax officials raided the office of Vishal.

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Ameer, director of the film, was slapped with sedition charges. Mercifully, the additional sessions court acquitted Ameer of sedition. While Mersal turned out to be a box-office hit in Tamil Nadu, the Kannada chauvinist saffron brigades stopped screening of the film in Karnataka, depriving the sizeable Tamil population of a chance to watch it. An advocate with saffron leanings filed a petition in the Madras High Court seeking a direction to revoke the censor board certificate of Mersal. An FIR was filed against Vijay in a Madurai police station alleging that the reference to GST and the Digital India monologues were critical of the government.

Taking advantage of the leaderless AIADMK government in Tamil Nadu for the past 12 months, the BJP’s national leadership has been desperately trying to take roots in the state. The farcical behaviour of local BJP leaders like demand for drastic cuts and threatening screening only exposes their intolerance of dissent.

If only leaders like Tamilisai Soundararajan, state president of the BJP, Pon Radhakrishnan, the party’s lone representative in the Union Council of Ministers from Tamil Nadu, and the party veteran H Raja had not taken up cudgels against Mersal, the film would have passed off as yet another Vijay starrer. The attention bestowed on Vijay by senior BJP leaders has given a tremendous boost to the star’s latent political ambitions.

The arena is already crowded with Kamal Haasan and Rajnikant and the fan-following of these stars has turned against the BJP. H Raja of the BJP gave a communal twist to the affair by posting a photocopy of Vijay’s voter ID on his twitter account giving his full name as C Vijay Joseph and asking mischievously, “Vijay says in Mersal that we should build hospitals instead of temples. Will he say the same about churches too?” The Tamil Nadu BJP has not covered itself with glory; it has though made Vijay a bigger star than he was.