Kamal Haasan used his speech in the Rajya Sabha to raise a warning he said could not be ignored.

Speaking during the motion of thanks on President Droupadi Murmu’s address to the joint sitting of Parliament, the actor-politician flagged what he called an “imminent concern” over the forthcoming elections in Tamil Nadu, linking it directly to the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Haasan said the right to vote itself was being put under scrutiny. “We want to cast vote sir and commissions are checking our right to vote,” he told the House, adding that people were facing checks over spellings and addresses, often “erroneously”.

Referring to the revision exercise, Haasan drew a sharp comparison. “Bihar has become a land of many living dead” and “we don't want this disease to spread across the country,” he said.

He went on to accuse the poll body of enabling the problem, stating, “EC (Election Commission) is surely facilitating the spread of this disease.”

Apparently terming the SIR as “the spell check story of the living dead”, Haasan argued that minor errors were being treated as disqualifications.

He said spelling mistakes were a curse only for languages and that modern literature forgives them in favour of content, as does the internet, but “Election Commission obviously does not”.

The MNM founder warned of the scale of the issue if it reached his home state. “We fear that there could soon be nearly one crore living dead on paper in Tamil Nadu,” he said, demanding that those struck off be restored to the rolls.

“If you refuse to help us with this redirection, you achieve nothing but half-baked, half-finished illegal electoral conquest,” he added, drawing loud desk-thumping from Opposition members.

Haasan stressed that democracy was not about conquest. “He said nobody conquers in democracy and the juggernaut called democratic India will roll on.” He followed it up with a broader warning to those in power.

“This democratic juggernaut will roll over differences, but should never roll over people. We will not allow it. Nobody is immortal. No government can or should aim for permanency. No government in the history of this world has achieved it yet and none ever will. This government also falls under the universal political unwritten law,” he said, urging all to “grow up along with a growing progressive democracy”.

The speech also traced Haasan’s personal journey, from cinema to politics, and his engagement with Tamil history.

“A child from Paramakudi (his birthplace in Tamil Nadu) was ushered into fame by cinema. That is when I was introduced to cinema and to my Tamil history. I confronted a confusing reality. A reality that did not reflect the promises made in our Constitution that India is a union of states,” he said.

He recalled his teachers and their influence on his political thinking, naming former Tamil Nadu chief minister C. N. Annadurai.

“He taught us to confront any invasion on our language, our culture and our rights,” Haasan said, calling on Parliament to correct the present “where we live and die”.