Suriya on politics: watching closely, never entering

With Vijay now Chief Minister, every Tamil star with a fan base and a charity gets asked the same question, and Suriya has the clearest possible answer. “Even if I don’t know the way, I will certainly not enter politics,” he said while promoting Scene, his Diwali release, now doing strong business at the box office.

He was careful to say this was not a dismissal. He does not dislike politics, he said, and he follows it closely, silently. He simply wants to spend his time on work he believes in and enjoys.

The question had come back because of his own film. The Scene trailer has a line about quitting a job to go into politics, and fans read it the way Tamil fans have read lines like that for decades, as a signal. In June, the All India Suriya Fans Club had to issue a statement after a former office-bearer named Veeramani went viral with a speech saying nobody could stop Suriya if he decided to become a people’s leader. The club called it a personal view from someone who had not held a post in three years, and said Suriya had no plans to enter politics. This time the denial comes from Suriya himself.

Most of what he said was about the Agaram Foundation, the educational trust he started in 2006, which supports students from poor families, many of them the first in their families to go to college. He does not call it social service, he said. It is a responsibility to the people who gave him his identity and his place in society, and there is no political motive behind it. That would be easy to doubt if Agaram had appeared only around election time, but it has run for two decades, and after Retro he gave it Rs 10 crore from the film’s profits.

He then made a broader argument. Young people who want to enter politics should first understand all of it, the difficulties and the responsibilities as well as the visibility. Anyone who wants to change society should put education first. Asked about corruption, which he called one of society’s biggest problems, he said no outsider could remove it. People have to look at their own conduct and refuse it in their daily lives. Much of what goes wrong, he said, comes from ignorance, and education is the only real cure for that.

It was not the answer the fans quoting his trailer were hoping for, but it fits what he has been doing for 20 years: putting money and effort into Agaram’s classrooms rather than politics.