Following poll defeat on home turf, PTR taking sabbatical from politics to return recharged,

Following an electoral defeat on his home turf, Madurai, former Tamil Nadu minister PTR Palanivel Thiagarajan is taking a sabbatical from politics so he can return to the field recharged and refreshed.

“After 10 years as an MLA… I am looking forward to a few weeks of time off – of life as a private citizen wholly in control of my time and schedule,” he said in a four-page statement posted on his ‘X’ handle. He is planning to utilise this break to lecture at home and abroad and complete a book he committed to a publisher, which is behind schedule.

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With a family legacy behind him, Thiagarajan, popularly known as PTR, is the face of modernity and continuity in the DMK. He had served in the MK Stalin cabinet as minister for Finance and Information Technology. Like many of his cabinet colleagues, including Stalin himself, who lost in the assembly election to the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) candidates, PTR was trounced by a greenhorn fielded by the TVK in the Madurai Central constituency, where he had been elected twice.

According to DMK insiders, PTR is the odd man out for the party. Despite his knowledge and wider exposure, as Finance Minister, he could not get along with his ministerial colleagues, which forced Stalin to shift him to the IT portfolio. “As FM, he proved to be an efficient accountant, finding all the loopholes in the system and trying to close them to plug the leakages,” was the remark doing the rounds then.

His grandfather, PT Rajan, a leader of the Justice Party (a precursor of the DMK), was briefly Chief Minister of the Madras Presidency. At the same time, his father, Palanivel Thiagarajan, was a minister in the Karunanidhi cabinet. While the DMK champions rationalism, the party has made an exception to this principle for PTR family, which is religious.

“Many requests to visit and give talks across India, which I could not afford the time for earlier, can now be accepted. During my tenure as Minister, I was denied the necessary permission on multiple occasions to travel overseas to accept invitations to lecture or participate in events. A break allows me to answer long-standing requests across the US, Europe, Singapore & Australia,” he said, adding, “I am already behind the originally committed schedule on a book I have contracted to publish with Harper Collins and will use this time to write.”