Tamil superstar Rajnikant’s iconic status has often inspired celebration of his background. Born to a Maratha family in Karnataka, he is the biggest hero in Tamil films this side of MGR. The numbers of his fan club members have invited gasps of incredulity, his every gesture onscreen is picked up for emulation by lesser actors across India, and the eager await a day when he will enter politics and presumably change it in a principled way. In so many ways, his popularity is a triumph over regional territoriality. Therefore, we would like to believe that his participation in Chennai in a short fast on the Hogenakkal drinking water project was meant to simply protest at the attacks on symbols of Tamil cinema in Karnataka — and not to mobilise popular sentiment along partisan lines on what had threatened to become an emotive conflict between the two states.

In the event, Tamil Nadu has put on hold the project till Karnataka gets an elected government after next month’s assembly elections. And thereby, as our columnist today notes, the possibility of ethnic tensions has been postponed — it has not passed. But the fact of members of the Tamil and Kannada film industries lending their presence to battle of wits between their respective states cannot be healthy. Karnataka-Tamil Nadu water disputes have taken a heavy toll in the past, especially in trouble in Bangalore in the early nineties. By pulling in their weight along territorial lines last week, the film industries of the two states risked galvanising inter-community tensions. No matter what their intention, role models in a society of spectacle must be alert to the immense emotive power they wield. After footballer Baichung Bhutia’s decision this month to boycott the Olympic torch, we argued in this columns that celebrities must understand their power and how to use this power. The other side of this argument is that they also understand the potential for conflict by their involvement in public issues.

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