CHENNAI: Diversion is an art and mastering it will give an edge to political leaders or parties to set a narrative or change the political discourse. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman succeeded to an extent in her attempt to deflect the attention from Manipur violence, which cornered the BJP’s double engine government, by resurrecting the alleged attack on AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa on March 25 in 1989 inside Tamil Nadu assembly.

Countering the onslaught from DMK MP Kanimozhi over the issue, Sitharaman said the DMK members “pulled” the saree of then opposition leader Jayalalithaa and “heckled and laughed at her” in the TN assembly. She made the remark while speaking at the no-confidence motion on August 10 in the Parliament.

Since then, the political discourse in Tamil Nadu has effectively shifted from Manipur and other key issues to two decade-old incidents. The leaders of the two Dravidian majors entered into a war of words over the incident. It brought back one of the evergreen comedy sequences of Vaigaipuyal Vadivel’s ‘Enna Kaiya Pudichu Illuthiya.’

The issue refused to die down even seven days after Sitharaman invoked Jayalalithaa’s saree incident. Now, the Manipur issue slowly faded away as the saree issue had come into fore and even prompted journalists and media houses to hunt for news clips of the incidents, while a few senior journalists even wrote columns recalling their memories of the incident.