'Captain' Vijayakanth laid to rest at DMDK headquarters

The mega star turned politician, whose last rites was conducted with full state honours, received a 72-gun salute.

Chennai: A sea of people descended on the streets of this metropolis on Friday to bid a tearful farewell to actor-politician Vijayakanth with the vehicle carrying his casket taking nearly four hours to reach the 10-km distance from the Island Grounds to his party headquarters, where he was laid to rest.

Vijayakanth, whose last rites was conducted with full state honours, received a 72-gun salute from the Tamil Nadu Police, as Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan, Chief Minister M K Stalin, and his cabinet colleagues, and senior leaders stood in silence.

Premalatha, Vijayakanth’s wife, her two sons – Vijaya Prabhakaran and Shanmuga Pandian –her brother Sudeesh and family members took one last look at him before the casket was lowered into a pit dug at the DMDK headquarters in Koyambedu.

Though Vijayakant was a practicing Hindu, he was buried in a manner similar to leaders like C N Annadurai, M G Ramachandran, J Jayalalithaa, and M Karunanidhi – all four have memorials built on the Marina Beach in their final resting places.

The 71-year-old had breathed his last at 6.10 am on Thursday at MIOT Hospital, where he was admitted on December 26 for pneumonia.

The mortal remains of Vijayakanth was shifted to the Island Ground off the Marina Beach early Friday morning – people faced numerous difficulties in paying respects to him at the party office on Thursday due to limited space – where the state government had made elaborate arrangements for public viewing.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Tamil Nadu Governor R N Ravi, Tamil superstars Rajinikanth, and Kamal Haasan and prominent personalities from several fields paid their last respects to Vijayakanth at the island grounds.

The final procession which began from Island Grounds at 2 pm took about four hours to reach Koyambedu, a distance of 10 km, as people stood on both sides of the Poonamallee High Road, one of the busiest stretches in the city, to take a look at Vijayakanth’s body.

As people raised slogans like ‘Long Live Captain’, Vijayakanth’s children stood with folded hands atop the vehicle and accepted people’s love. Thousands of people who waited outside the party headquarters switched on the lights on their phones as the vehicle carrying Vijayakanth’s casket passed them.

The founder of Desiya Dravida Murpokku Kazhagam (DMDK), which once challenged the Dravidian majors DMK and AIADMK with impressive vote percentage in the first few elections, was keeping unwell for the past few years.

Vijayakanth is the only actor in Tamil Nadu, where politics and the film industry has an intricate connection, to have displayed the rare guts to challenge the supremacy of Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa by launching his own party when they were super-active in politics.

An unconventional politician, Vijayakanth, at one point, was considered as a viable alternative to the Dravidian majors – DMK and AIADMK. A series of setbacks and his failing health sunk the party whose vote percentage came down to 0.45 per cent from 10.3 per cent in just about 12 years.