On May 30, claims of Tamil Nadu’s current Finance Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan being a United States citizen went viral. Saravanaprasad Balasubramanian, Editorial Member of News Portal Mediyaan, alleged in a Twitter post that on scanning American Citizenship Records, it was found Thiagarajan is a US citizen. Thiagarajan had replied to similar allegations on May 20 and used ‘cow urine’ jibe to answer the netizen who had raised the allegations.
In the post, Balasubramanian said, “American Citizenship Record scan shows that the current Tamilnadu Finance Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan as a US Citizen. According to Indian law, it is illegal for a foreign citizen to contest in any election or vote.”
https://twitter.com/BS_Prasad/status/1399045670447681536?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwIn the next tweet, he referred to a Facebook post by one Narenthiran PS where he had claimed to have found Thiagarajan’s record as a US citizen.
In a follow-up post written in Tamil, he wrote, “It is commonly possible to know information such as a US citizen or a green card holder or an H1-B visa. If you pay for it as already said. The information I have taken about a Tamil Nadu Finance Minister was also taken from a similar company. I’m stopping with this though I can get more info than that.” He detailed out how someone can take US citizenship and added, “Further minister can prove himself like that. The truth is that it doesn’t even take five minutes. But let’s wait and see if he does.”
When we tried searching the American citizenship database on instantcheckmate.com, we found one record associated with the name Palanivel Thiagarajan. Though two people can have similar names, what attracted our attention was the name of possible relatives that included “Margaret Rajan”.
It has to be noted that Thiagarajan is married to a US citizen named Margaret and has two children. Thiagarajan had lived in the US for 20 years after he left India in 1987. Margaret was his classmate and later married him. In 2007, after his father’s demise, he returned to India. In 2011, he moved to Singapore for a job and stayed there for four years. In 2015, he returned to India for good and contested the election in 2016 under DMK.
Thiagarajan had laughed at the allegations
This is not the first time Thiagarajan is facing allegations associated with his citizenship. On May 20, an anonymous Twitter handle made similar allegations in which the user had claimed Thiagarajan hold an OCI card.
He quoted the tweet while using the ‘cow urine’ jibe and said, “Filtered idiots have become insane from drinking too much cow urine – alleging I am on OCI cardholder (who cannot even vote).” The anonymous account has since been suspended.