Chief minister and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) president MK Stalin on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah not to remove Tamil Nadu governor RN Ravi until the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

The chief minister said the governor’s criticism against Dravidam was adding strength to the DMK’s election campaign. Stalin made these remarks while referring to the incident where the governor had blamed the DMK for a petrol bomb attack, that took place on Wednesday, in front of the Raj Bhavan. The attack was done by an individual who is a habitual offender, and has been arrested.

“The governor should be allowed to continue [in Tamil Nadu]. He is running a parallel campaign which is indirectly adding more strength to our campaign,” Stalin said while speaking at a party member’s family wedding in Chennai. “Please don’t change him. At least till 2024 Lok Sabha elections. It has indirectly come to benefit us. And, the governor’s statements aren’t being taken seriously by the people. No one gives importance to his statements.”

Governor Ravi and the ruling DMK have been at loggerheads over various administrative issues and ideological differences. The DMK government has described the governor as a working agent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent, the RSS. The governor’s stance on various issues have been backed by the BJP unit in the state, which makes it a direct contest with the DMK, leaving the principal opposition AIADMK out of the picture. And the DMK uses the governor’s utterances and actions to further their contention that the BJP-led Union government uses governors as tools in states, where they do not rule, to interfere with the state’s autonomy.

Meanwhile, the Tamil Nadu’s senior police officials including director general of police Shankar Jiwal, Greater Chennai police commissioner Sandeep Rai Rathore and the additional general of police (law and order) held a press conference on Friday and released a CCTV footage related to the Raj Bhavan petrol bomb incident on Wednesday and of a protest against the governor from April 2022, to prove that there was no security lapse. The Raj Bhavan had on Wednesday said that the state police was “preventing a detailed investigation” into the attack by diluting the offence to an “act of simple vandalism” and getting the accused remanded after “waking up” the judge at midnight. It also alleged that in April 2022, the governor’s convoy was “physically attacked with sticks and stones,” during his visit to Mayiladuthurai.

However, the CCTV footage released by police shows a black flag held by a protester falling on a private vehicle after the governor’s convoy has passed. Jiwal had, on Thursday, said that 73 people have been arrested in the incident. In reference to the Raj Bhavan petrol bomb incident, the CCTV footage showed that the security personnel stationed at the Raj Bhavan had acted immediately to nab the accused ‘Korukka’ Vinod before he could set on fire the four bottles filled with petrol. The accused however, managed to fling two bottles, that damaged plants and barricades, but no one was injured in the incident.

The Guindy police filed an FIR against the accused on October 25 under several sections of the Indian Penal Code, Explosive Substances Act and the Tamil Nadu Public Property (Prevention of Damage and Loss) Act. HT has seen a copy of the FIR. He has been remanded to 15 days of judicial custody. “We were not in a hurry to complete the investigation,” Jiwal said on Friday.