Tamil Nadu CM’s son and Sports Minister Udayanidhi Stalin has said that he and his wife are Christians. He said this while speaking at a DMK organised Christmas celebration event. CM and ministers have repeatedly pandered to the Christian vote bank by saying that the DMK could form government thanks to the Christian community, but Udayanidhi has just dropped the truth bomb and revealed the real reason behind the appeasement.

Udayanidhi was invited to a Christmas celebration event organised by DMK in his constituency in Chennai. Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE) minister Sekar Babu and Chennai Mayor Priya also took part in the event. While speaking there Udayanidhi said, “Everyone is asking what is the Dravidian Model. It is a HRCE minister saying Hallelujah to wish people here. This is social justice. This is what Periyar, Anna(durai), Karunanidhi, Anbazhagan, etc taught us.”

“Sanghis will feel irritated if I say this. But I’m proud to say that I’m a Christian. I went to a Christian school, Christian college and the woman I loved and married is a Christian. This event is a testament to how minister Sekar Babu is maintaining social harmony”. Udayanidhi had said that he and his wife are atheists. He had shared a photo of his daughter holding Ganesha murti during Ganesh Chaturthi.

Rabid Dravidianists and Periyarists were against the DMK scion sharing an “idol” when the party and its mother organisations’ policy is against “idol worship”. Later he deleted the tweet and issued a statement ‘clarifying‘ that “he and his wife are atheists”. Now he has said that both are Christians. There are three possibilities.

Udayanidhi said it to irritate ‘sanghis’ whose sole purpose on the internet seems to be finding new topics to outrage and new people to expose. This could be a ploy to divert attention from some other social or political issue that the opposition is talking about. TN BJP President K Annamalai has been exposing corruption at every level in the DMK government frequently. 

Recently DMK tried to divert the public attention from these exposes by taking up issue with his Rafale watch claiming that he got the costly watch as a ‘gift’. But the accusation doesn’t really seem to stick and infact gas backfired as people started questioning how Udayanidhi or Stalin’s son-in-law Sabareesan’s worth increased so much. Perhaps Udayanidhi has given something for the public to chew over to stop them from discussing DMK corruption.

Another possibility is that like Andhra Pradesh, the Christian community’s population is drastically higher than the census shows and DMK realising this has gone full steam in appeasing them to bag their votes. YSRCP rebel MP Raghuram Raju had revealed that the Christian population in the state is under reported and their real number would be around 25%. From the moment of assuming power, every influential person in the government, including CM Stalin have said time and again that it is thanks to Christian community and their prayers that they came to power. In fact CM Stalin said, “This government was installed by you” in a Church of South India(CSI) event.

The third possibility, however remote it might seem to a natural observer, could be the absolute truth. That Udayanidhi and his wife Kiruthiga are indeed Christians and have been hiding that fact in the guise of atheism and rationalism. After all Bharat had a ‘Dalit’ President who was buried in a Christian cemetery and no one the wiser during his tenure.