A video of a leftist lawyer gloating about Brahmin pujaris being dragged by their tuft has surfaced on social media. He has been leading the campaign against the traditional custodians and pujaris of Chidambaram Nataraja temple and seeking the government to take over the temple.
Raji, an advocate and part of Makkal Adhikaram, a rabid leftist organisation gleefully described how Brahmin pujaris of Chidambaram temple were dragged by their tuft by police. The video of him mocking Brahmin pujaris and gloating about the violence has surfaced on social media. He spoke at an event of Makkal Adhikaram titled “Thillai Dikshitars won’t give up their arrogance”.
He said, “The commando force entered. But they(Brahmins) had applied oil on their bodies. So when police tried to grab them they kept slipping away. It was like a battlefield. In the end only after getting hold of their tufts, did the policemen throw them out”. Shockingly but not surprisingly the audience clapped and laughed when he said that Brahmins were dragged by their tufts.
He also mocked the Dikshitars saying one of them had bitten a policeman when he was manhandled and he advised the latter to get checked. He said, “I told him to get the injection immediately. He(Dikshitar) is not an ordinary person. If it’s a dog or something else, we will at least know what bit us and what will happen to us. But we don’t know what will happen if this man bites you. They eat so many things..So immediately get the medicine”.
Dravidianists have been asking DMK to take over the Chidambaram temple from Dikshitars even before it came back to power in 2021. Chidambaram temple has been an eyesore for Dravidianists and leftists as it is the only major Agamic temple managed by private parties in Tamil Nadu. The DMK government has been trying to find fault with Dikshitars’ administration from the day it was sworn in and staging incidents to trump up charges against them.
The HRCE minister openly said that they were looking into possibilities and legal process of taking over the Chidambaram temple and that the CM is personally involved in this. They tried to instigate Dikshitars against each other by making one of them, a disgruntled pujari, file a complaint against the administrative committee. Next, they filed a complaint under the SC, ST Atrocities Act with the help of another disgruntled Dikshitar by staging an incident where a woman tried to break the rules.
Then the HRCE claimed that they had received complaints of mismanagement and asked for the accounts and books to inspect them. But when the Dikshitars asked HRCE officials to show the complaints they said that the complaints were from social media users. Then they set up a committee to “receive” complaints. HRCE published ads in local newspapers asking the public to come forward and file complaints in “two days”. Now they claim that there are a lot of discrepancies and that they have received thousands of complaints from the public.
Advocate Raji of Makkal Adhikaram is one of them. He filed a complaint through a 87 year old man alleging that a minor boy and girl were married off by the Dikshitars. It is unclear how it concerns the temple affairs as only the 2 families and the pujari who performed the marriage rituals can be blamed if it’s true. Makkal Adhikaram is a rabid leftist organisation which was accused by TN police of instigating violence in the anti-Sterlite protest. It was also part of protests against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, Neutrino Observatory and NEET exam.
From the video it is clear that he could have trumped up even these charges purely because of the hatred he has for the community. It is to be seen whether the DMK government will stage something big to wrench control of the temple from the Dikshitars or the SC judgement will save them.
