A few photos of two youngsters, shared without their permission, have been doing the rounds on social media. The young people, male and female, are simply having a little fun. Everything happening in the photos seems to be happening with mutual consent. What they did not consent to, on the other hand, is for these pictures being circulated on various social media platforms. So why did a large number of people think it fit to share these photos and pass distasteful comments on the youngsters? Because the young man in the photos is Inbanithi, the 18-year-old son of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (DMK) Youth Wing Secretary Udhayanidhi Stalin. The leap from political critique to crude comments about the private lives of young people, whoever they might be, is both vast and inexcusable.
What the exact nature of the relationship the youngsters share should ideally be nobody else’s concern, yet Inbanithi’s mother and Udhayanidhi’s wife Kiruthiga, has had to intervene on the youngsters’ behalf. Her tweet, short as it is, is refreshing nevertheless. “Don't be afraid to love and express it. It's one of the ways to understand nature in its full glory,” she tweeted on January 5.
Don't be afraid to love and express it. It's one of the ways to understand nature in it's full glory.
— kiruthiga udhayanidh (@astrokiru) January 5, 2023
Kiruthiga’s succinct statement, that refuses to offer explanations as if the youngsters had done something wrong, is as appreciable as it is rare from publicly known figures in India. Her tweet is refreshing simply because it refuses to accept the moral policing the youngsters were subjected to as something she, or the two young people, need to be held accountable for. Offering explanations for the photos would have been an admittance to the imagined guilt that the hate-campaign is projecting onto a benign and consensual interaction. An apology would have created the impression that such interactions are intrinsically something to be ashamed of, and something to offer apology for when ‘found out’.
Udhayanidhi, who is also Chief Minister MK Stalin’s son, was recently appointed the Minister for Youth Welfare and Sports Development. The appointment stirred up fresh controversy about dynastic politics in the party. While the issue of dynastic politics is hardly a problem peculiar to the DMK, political figures can never be above being questioned for their work. But exactly what grounds does anyone have to comment on Udhayanidhi’s young son’s personal life?
We should also be asking what justification can anyone provide for having circulated the photos of the young woman who is in the photos with Inbanithi. What about her safety and mental health, now, post this incident? Inbanithi has barely entered adulthood. He has no active role in the DMK. To the people thinking he and the young woman are fair game to play politics with, let me borrow an internet slang and tell you: moral policing isn’t the hot take you think it is.
It’s staggering how in a country where relationships that do not strictly fall into caste, class and heteronormative structures face constant violence, a handful of photos showing two happy youngsters seems to merit so much attention. The incident speaks more about the regressive and proprietorial tendencies regarding the love-life of others gripping this country, than it does about Inbanithi or the young woman.
One also has to question the sheer entitlement of the people circulating the photos — the youngsters themselves don’t seem to have put them up anywhere. And even if they had, what business is it of anyone else’s? Particularly when one of the youngsters is a woman, the social media hate-campaign can be traumatising.
Trolls and sundry social media users move on easily to new targets. One hopes that the two youngsters caught in the crosshairs, for no fault of theirs, have the time and space to recover from the incident.
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