A day after the Edappadi K.Palanisami government won the trust vote in the Tamil Nadu assembly, a notice was sent to former chief minister O.Panneerselvam, asking him to vacate his official residence in Chennai, allotted to him when he was appointed minister in 2012.
One can witness a visible change in narrow lane off the high profile Greenways Road, leading to ‘Thenpennai’. The official residence of former CM lacks the energy that it had a couple of weeks before. Except for the rustle of the dry leaves, some of his supporters walking in for meetings and a few television channels waiting near the portico, there is not much activity at the residence of the man who had overturned Tamil Nadu politics after a 40-minute meditation.
Huge crowds of people had walked in to express support for Panneerselvam after he revolted against the Sasikala camp.
Now, after Palanisami won the trust vote on February 18, Panneerselvam has been asked to vacate the official residence of the chief minister in which he has been living since 2011. The name board outside his house, which never called him as the chief minister even after Jayalalithaa’s death, no longer exists. Reportedly, he has donated at least six native breeds of cattle from the the cow shed of his official residence. In fact, a month before, during the Jallikattu protest, a small video slip showing the native breed being raised at his residence went viral in the social media. The video was shot by a group of students who went calling on Panneerselvam to lift the ban on Jallikattu.
Panneerselvam’s camp terms the move by the state government asking him to vacate as vindictive. In fact, as per the government norms, OPS, says sources in the government, can continue to stay for two months paying the rent at market rate. If sources in his camp are to be believed, OPS is in search of a bungalow in and around Chennai’s posh Adyar and Besant Nagar and that he might shift into.
Interestingly, in the last six decades, Panneerselvam is the only chief minister of Tamil Nadu to reside in the official bungalow allotted by the government. His predecessor and mentor J.Jayalalithaa always preferred her swanky bungalow in Poes Garden. She never occupied the government-allotted house during her three terms as Chief minister.
Her predecessor and arch-rival M.Karunanidhi always lived his Gopalapuram residence, preferring to shuttle between his two houses in Gopalapuram and CIT colony. And MGR resided in Ramavaram Gardens, which now houses a school for the hearing impaired. In fact, in the last 60 years, Panneerselvam is the only chief minister to have lived in a government-allotted bungalow. He had been living in his official residence after he was elevated as the revenue minister in Jayalalithaa’s cabinet in 2001.
He had lived in the official CM’s bungalow during his brief tenure in 2001 and again since 2011 after he was elected as MLA for the third consecutive term and served as the finance minister in Jayalalithaa’s cabinet.
It may be recalled that V.R.Nedunchezhian, who was the interim chief minister after MGR’s death, stayed in the official CM’s bungalow from December 25 1987 to January 7 1988. Before Nedunchezhian only two chief ministers – O Ramasamy Reddiyar, who was the chief minister of the then Madras Presidency and his successor P.S.Kumaraswamy Raja lived in the official CM’s official residence. While Ramasamy Reddiyar lived in the then Cooum house, Kumarasamy Raja lived in the government-allotted residence on Greenways road.
