A controversy that has resurfaced in Tamil political and entertainment circles centres on a headline published by Malayala Manorama during the 1996 assembly election campaign in Tamil Nadu, which described Rajinikanth as a drunkard. The line, which appeared while the superstar was campaigning for the DMK - Tamil Maanila Congress alliance against J. Jayalalithaa's AIADMK, is now being recalled alongside the claim that the actor put his own career at risk for Jayalalithaa's sake - and that her conduct after his death has settled the question of who stood by whom.

The episode belongs to one of the most turbulent phases of Rajinikanth's public life. Until the mid-1990s he had largely kept his politics private, and his decision to share a platform with the DMK in 1996 marked a sharp break. His remarks during that campaign, widely interpreted as a call for voters to reject the incumbent AIADMK government, are credited by many observers with shaping the outcome. The personal cost was immediate and heavy: sections of the press turned on him, and the characterization of him as a heavy drinker became a shorthand for questioning his credibility as a public voice.

The 1996 turning point and the personal price

What is often forgotten is how directly the episode touched his family. Rajinikanth's wife, Latha, has spoken in the past about the strain of that period, describing how the attacks affected the household and how the actor weighed the damage to an image built over two decades. For a star whose screen persona rested on restraint and moral authority, being painted as a drunkard was not an ordinary political hit - it was an assault on the foundation of his stardom.

The deeper political context was Jayalalithaa herself. Rajinikanth had, by most accounts, been personally close to her, and his decision to campaign against her in 1996 has long been read as a collision between personal regard and political calculation rather than a simple rivalry. His later political trajectory only deepened the ambiguity: two decades on, he would announce his own party and describe his relationship with her legacy in terms that were respectful rather than combative.

The 1996 affair is, therefore, commonly cited as the moment when a film star learned that political speech carries a price measured in more than votes. The claim that he put his career on the line for Jayalalithaa rests on that paradox - that the person he was thought to be closest to became the figure against whom he campaigned, and that the resulting backlash struck at the very reputation he had spent years building.

Why the old headline is being read again

The renewed attention is part of a wider pattern in Tamil and Malayalam media, where archival material from the 1990s is regularly recirculated and reassessed. What has changed is the framing. Where the 1996 coverage presented the drinking allegation as a political weapon, current discussion tends to treat it as evidence of how aggressively the star was targeted - and to ask what the episode reveals about loyalty in politics.

That question has no settled answer. Those who see Rajinikanth as a man who paid a personal price for standing with Jayalalithaa point to the ferocity of the attacks he absorbed and to his refusal, in the years that followed, to speak of her with rancour. Those who take the opposite view argue that his 1996 campaign was a political choice like any other, made in a moment when the DMK alliance appeared to offer the stronger platform, and that reading it as martyrdom for Jayalalithaa inverts the sequence of events.

What is not in dispute is the effect on his public image. The "drunkard" framing followed him for years in the form of insinuation and innuendo, and it became a standard example of how personal attacks can outlast the election that produced them.

The personal and the political

For Malayalam readers, the story carries a familiar resonance: film stardom and political power in southern India have long been entangled, and the cost of crossing that line is rarely limited to the ballot box. Rajinikanth's case is distinctive only in the scale of his fame and in the unusual intimacy of his relationship with the leader he opposed.

The actor has not commented on the revived discussion, and there is no indication that he intends to. The archival headline remains what it always was - a document of a moment when a movie icon's private habits were turned into campaign material, and when the consequences ran far beyond the election result. Whether it proves loyalty or its opposite depends entirely on which part of the story the reader chooses to weigh first.

For now, the debate is being conducted largely in retrospect, by readers encountering the 1996 material for the first time and by older audiences remembering how it played out. Neither camp has produced new evidence, and the episode is likely to remain what it has been for three decades: a Rorschach test for how one reads Rajinikanth's relationship with Jayalalithaa, and with political power itself.

Source: Filmibeat Malayalam