“When EVR Broke Ganesha Murtis, One Hindu Took The Fight To Supreme Court”, TheCommuneMag, 13 Sep 2026.

“On 27 May 1953, a public act in Tiruchirappalli placed religion, political protest and criminal law on a collision course. At a meeting held at the Town Hall Maidan, E.V. Ramaswami Naicker, widely known as Periyar or EVR, publicly broke a clay idol of Lord Ganesha. The act was presented by its organisers as a symbolic assault on idol worship and the social order associated with it. For Hindu devotees, however, the act was not an abstract political performance: it was a deliberate public insult to an object held sacred by a religious community.

EVR broke two idols of Lord Ganesha by hitting them with his walking-stick at a public meeting in Tiruchi on the Vaisakh-Pournima ‘enlightenment day’ of Lord Buddha. This act of breaking of idols was carried out in several parts of the town, before the branch offices of Dravida Kazhagam. The despicable act started with a processing starting from the Clock Tower with a portrait of Buddha and passed through the West Boulevard Road towards the Town Hall Maidan, where the public meeting had been organised for breaking of idols by EVR.

In his speech before breaking the idol, he said that this was the first in the campaign for breaking the idols of similar other gods in future, so that at the end there would be only one God. A case was also lodged for the idol breaking by EVR and the several articles he wrote in ‘Viduthalai’ propagating the idea of breaking idols of God and thus ‘wilfully insulting” the religious feelings of a certain section of the Hindu community. Similar religious insults were published in other Dravidian publications too……….”

Read the full article at TheCommuneMag.