Though the demand was forgone by Annadurai and DMK in , the party and its leaders continued with other hateful campaigns. In , he had infamously questioned the existence of Lord Ram only to provoke sentiments of Tamil Hindus, while speaking at a function in Erode, as the then Chief Minister of TN.
In which engineering college did he study and become a civil engineer? When did he build this so-called bridge? A narrative of victimhood is often woven around the Brahmin community in Tamil Nadu.
As Seshadri points out, it is a distant dream for anyone from the community to land a medical seat in government colleges. But prominent voices from within the community also deny economic suppression. While powerful Other Backward Castes OBC communities have been able to wrest political control from the upper castes, the most backward of all communities, the Dalits, continue to be subjugated and oppressed.
The Census revealed that Tamil Nadu was the third largest state in Dalit population at 7. For political parties representing Dalits, like the Viduthalai Chirathugal Katchi, the OBCs have become the main political opponents, even as anti-Brahminism continues to be a part of their political discourse. But at the heart of caste-politics in Tamil Nadu lies the story of the spectacular failure of the Dravidian movement to create an egalitarian society.
This story is from August 8, File Photo. But the stance was purely political and the DMK leader was a professional who as chief minister never showed any bias, say several top bureaucrats who worked with him. When Guhan died in , Karunanidhi said he had lost a close and trusted friend.
Others say Karunanidhi never let his personal views influence his work. The reason is simple. The national intellectual landscape is verdant. The Dravidian landscape, on the other hand, is an arid desert, and Periyar was the only cactus plant to have bloomed in it. Karunanidhi front row, third from left and Periyar fourth. Source: YouTube. Krishnan is an author in both English and Tamil. He regularly contributes to various journals and magazines. They somehow contrive to have the rulers in their pocket, participate in governance and conspire to torture and suck the lives out of other citizens in order that they live in comfort.
If you had read them in isolation and if you were familiar with the history of the Nazis, it is likely that you would think they must have been fished out of some sordid pro-Nazi tabloid. This is Periyar E. Ramasamy writing in his magazine Kudiyarasu, and he is being unusually mild here.
Periyar was a selfless and incorruptible man of considerable personal charm. He spent his long life tirelessly working in support of what he believed in and against what he detested. What he believed in were self-respect, rationalism, gender equality and his own version of social justice. What he detested were caste discrimination, Gandhi, god, religion, Brahmins and the then-prevailing idea of India. Unlike B. Ambedkar, who was a prodigious scholar, Periyar was a street-fighter, and the things he said in anger are largely unprintable though it is available in print in Tamil.
What he said in cooler moments — rare though they were — are also available. The Periyar that the non-Tamil intellectuals know is a sanitised version of his real personality, lovingly packaged and offered by his admirers.
It is almost axiomatic in Tamil Nadu, and constantly parroted by non-Tamils too, that it was thanks only to Periyar that reservations in jobs and education came into being in the state. In fact, reservations were first introduced in Tamil Nadu in , when P. Subbarayan was the chief minister and had the support of the Swarajya Party, and when Periyar was just leaving the Congress. Bear in mind that Periyar in the s did not have the larger than life image that he has now. Though he was personally liked by almost all political leaders, almost all of them considered him to be maverick, unrestrained and irresponsible.
In all his agitations — and he had many — the lowest common denominator was the Brahmin. He said, without so much as a pause, that Gandhi was killed by Brahmins because Gandhi was turning into a Periyar himself!
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