Chennai: Describing Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan as ‘marginal political players’, senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar has said they remain very popular film stars but are unable to attract public opinion to their point of view in political terms.

Aiyar, who has been named in three key panels set up by the Congress for Tamilnadu polls, asserted that superstar Rajinikanth’s decision that he will not enter electoral politics will not make any difference as the state prepares for the assembly polls.

“When he (Rajinikanth) said he was going to come into politics, I said it is not going to make a tinker’s difference, now that he has decided not to come into politics, I repeat what I said, it is not going to make a tinker’s difference,” Aiyar said.

“Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth are not anything but marginal political players,” the former Union Minister said.

It was different in the old days when people like M G Ramachandran (MGR), Sivaji Ganesan and even Jayalalithaa were involved in films that carried a revolutionary social message, he said.

“Since these two (Rajinikanth and Haasan) have never used cinema as a medium for a political message, they remain what they are very very popular film stars, but not people who attract public opinion to their point of view in political terms,” Aiyar said.

He argued that there have been no two actors more popular on the Hindi silver screen than Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna, but “what flops they were in politics.” The same thing applies in the South, he added.