Hindu awakening in the country has been accompanied with despairing calls of separatism from the extremist malcontents wedded to foreign ideologies and religions who harbor a visceral hate for Dharma and Bharat’s ancient civilization.
The latest to join the bandwagon with Islamists, evangelical missionaries and Khalistanis is DMK MP A Raja, who represents the Nilgiris constituency of Tamil Nadu. In a viral video, Raja can be seen threatening to revive the demand for an ‘independent’ Tamil Nadu that was once made by Dravidian patriarch EV Ramasamy aka ‘Periyar’. This openly secessionist call was made in the presence of Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin, during a DMK party meeting of representatives of urban local bodies. The conference was held in Namakkal in western Tamil Nadu.
#JustIn: DMK MP threatens the centre citing Periyar's secession bid saying 'give #TamilNadu autotnomy or we will seek separation.'
— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) July 4, 2022
Cong leader Americai V. Narayanan speaks to @anchoramitaw & @prathibhatweets. pic.twitter.com/xdtOY4wqlm
“Prime Minister and Home Minister say they consider everyone equal. I would like to tell them something. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has started working for India, abandoning its demand for a separate country, Tamil Nadu. But I remember what our leader Periyar said three months before his death. He said, as long as Tamilians stay with India, there will not be opportunity to grow; the Hindus will treat us as ‘panchama’. For us, there will not be any growth at all. Tamilians will not be well-represented and well-occupied,” Raja is reported to have said as per Organiser.
“Periyar said, if you want to prosper, wear a badge on your chest, (fight) for independent Tamil Nadu. In spite of our ideologue’s call for separate nationhood, we continued to work for and lived for India. I request Prime Minister and Amit Shah not to force us to tread the path of Periyar, taking a deviation from the path shown by Annadurai (former TN Chief Minister and DMK founder). So consider the (interests of) state of Tamil Nadu,” he added.
A Raja is one of the prime accused in the gigantic 2G Spectrum corruption scam during UPA-1 when Raja was the Union minister for Communication and Information Technology in the Manmohan Singh cabinet. Raja and two other DMK MPs, Dayanidhi Maran (grand-nephew of late DMK supremo M. Karunanidhi) and Kanimozhi (Karunanidhi’s daughter) were acquitted in that case along with several other influential accused in 2017 by special judge OP Saini due to ‘lack of evidence’.
EVR aka ‘Periyar’
E.V. Ramasamy (EVR), founder of the ‘Dravidian Movement’, is one of the most controversial figures of 20th century Bharat. He is known by his followers as ‘Periyar’ meaning ‘respected one’ or ‘elder’ in Tamil.
EVR’s entire socio-political ideology can be summed up in two words: anti-Brahminism and anti-Hinduism. Although touted as an anti-caste activist by his hagiographers, EVR had no love lost for Scheduled Caste people (aka ‘Dalits’), and often advocated the interests of dominant land-holding sections at the expense of the poor peasants. However, EVR’s hate for Brahmins was of a different magnitude. It was actually no different than the German Nazi view of Jews. In a spine-chilling speech delivered by EVR in 1973 (the year he died), he said that ‘all Tamil Brahmins must be killed and all temples and murtis destroyed’.
EVR was an advocate of a separate Dravidian country, Dravida Nadu, and kept stoking separatism among Tamils right upto his death in 1973. He was a firm believer in the racist Aryan-Dravidian theory manufactured by British colonisers like Bishop Robert Caldwell.
In 1939, EVR took over the presidency of the Justice Party and in 1944 he changed its name to Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), the precursor to today’s DMK. From 1940 onwards, he advocated for an independent Dravida Nadu free of ‘Aryan’ influence, and supported the Muslim League demand for Pakistan.
EVR met with Jinnah, Ambedkar and the British to push his idea of a trifurcation of Bharat. In 1949, DK split and a new political outfit DMK was formed by CN Annadurai. However, the Dravida Nadu idea never found traction with other southern states, and DMK changed the demand to ‘independent Tamil Nadu’. This demand for an independent nation was finally dropped by DMK in 1963.
