By invoking his star power to castigate NEET as anti-poor and anti-rural, actor-turned-politician Vijay has found a convenient rhetorical device to launch his political innings. Addressing high-scoring students at a felicitation event in Mahabalipuram, he declared that NEET was unjust and should be abolished, aligning himself with the broader anti-NEET sentiment that resonates widely in Tamil Nadu. But while his position may appear aligned with progressive ideals on the surface, a closer look reveals that Vijay’s statement is not only reductive—it risks undermining a far more substantive debate around educational equity and systemic reform.
The Tamil Nadu government’s opposition to NEET has been shaped by empirical data and sustained legal-political efforts. Since the introduction of NEET in 2017, multiple state-appointed expert panels and academic studies have underlined how the centralised entrance exam marginalises students from rural areas, Tamil-medium schools, and first-generation learners. The dominance of coaching culture, urban-centric question framing, and linguistic disparities have compounded the structural exclusion that NEET enforces. Yet, for all its flaws, NEET is not a singular villain. It is symptomatic of a wider centralisation of education policy that curtails state autonomy and flattens diversity.
What Vijay misses—or chooses not to engage with—is the layered intellectual and political history that has informed Tamil Nadu’s resistance to NEET. His sweeping denunciation of the exam came without context, without critique of its federal implications, and certainly without an alternative framework. In aligning with the anger against NEET but failing to articulate a roadmap, Vijay reduces a deeply contested issue into an applause line. Therein lies the problem: he offers a headline without the policy body.
For a leader who speaks the language of clean governance and transformative politics, Vijay’s reliance on popular sentiment rather than institutional understanding is telling. The NEET debate is not just about access to medical education. It is also about whether states can assert educational sovereignty within the constitutional framework. It is about resisting the idea that merit is neutral, and recognising that structural inequality reproduces itself when the same yardstick is used to measure unequal players.
By simply declaring NEET as anti-poor, Vijay overlooks the nuanced battles that have been fought in courts, in legislatures, and in civil society for years. This is not to say that political rhetoric has no place in resistance. But in this case, rhetoric without a roadmap risks becoming spectacle without consequence.
More importantly, Vijay’s call for abolition lacked depth on what should replace NEET. Does he envision a state-level entrance exam rooted in the Samacheer Kalvi curriculum? Should the admission process revert to Class 12 board exam marks? What safeguards would be installed to protect against subjective bias, favoritism, or administrative opacity? Would there be transparency mechanisms to ensure rural and Dalit students are not again left behind? These questions remain unanswered, and without answers, his anti-NEET positioning floats as a populist performance.
Political movements across India have witnessed many such moments where celebrity power enters the space of grassroots struggle. The risk, as always, is that the issue becomes secondary to the figure. The fight against NEET has never been about personality. It has been about protecting the idea of equitable access, linguistic justice, and regional autonomy in education policy.
There is also a broader danger in reducing educational injustice to a singular issue. While NEET rightly attracts criticism, deeper questions around school funding, teacher vacancies, mid-day meal programme erosion, and caste-based educational exclusions continue to haunt Tamil Nadu and other states. To foreground NEET without foregrounding these realities is to fight the battle on a shallow field.
If Vijay wants to be more than a performer on the campaign stage, he must first learn to respect the audience—not just with catchy lines, but with clarity, responsibility, and vision.
His address in Mahabalipuram could have been an opportunity to bring substance to a serious issue. Instead, it defaulted to the comfort of cinematic certainties and rhetorical flair. To challenge the establishment, one must not only speak truth to power—but also speak truth with precision.
For now, Vijay’s politics remains aspirational but untested. If he truly wishes to script a different future for Tamil Nadu, he must do more than mirror popular anger—he must be prepared to lead it with informed conviction.
