LINGUISTIC TERRORISTS OF TAMIL NADU

For Dravidian politicians Tamil interest is above national interest

By S R Ramanujan

You can’t find more obsessive feudal politicians in any part of democratic world or society than in Tamil Nadu. Dravidian parties may swear by rationalism, but their leaders are anything but rational. They are narcissistic to the core, megalomaniac to a fault and excessively intolerant. While Amma wants every MP or MLA to prostrate before her in public, in the case of Ayya (people in Tamil Nadu know Muthuvel Karunanidhi only by this honorific pronoun) no one can dare address him by his name. Either it should be “Kalaignar” or “Ayya” or “Thalivar”.

It is difficult to keep a count on how many times, Amma sacks her ministers for trivial reasons or without any reasons at all. “In” and “Exit” gates to her council of ministers are always on the standby either to open or shut depending on the whims of Amma. Karunanidhi may preach atheism to his partymen, but when it comes to his close family, his sermons stop at a respectable distance. The name of the game is hypocrisy, sheer hypocrisy. Reason and logic have no place in Dravidian politics and that is what the country is witnessing these days.  Sycophancy at its best!

Look at the reaction in Tamil Nadu against Sri Lankan defence ministry website’s article and caricature of Amma and Narendra Modi. Perhaps they were offensive enough to incur the wrath of politicians in Tamil Nadu. The External Affairs Ministry in Delhi took prompt action, knowing Amma’s theatrics, and the objectionable post was deleted and an apology was tendered by the Sri Lankan government. Karunanidhi, too, shed crocodile tears, with an anticipation that this episode might lead to some uncomfortable equations between Modi and Jaya. But, Tamil politicians were not satisfied at the apology and our national channels also were also in the same league in that even after Sri Lankan apology they have had the usual high decibel panel discussions. With 37-member strength in LS, there was an uproar in Parliament and Sri Lankan envoy was summoned just to placate regal Amma. True to the style of Amma’s politics and her feudal culture, her partymen perhaps expected Sri Lankan President Mahindra Rajapakshe to rush to Poes Garden in Chennai and prostrate before Amma.

Since it did not happen, Amma’s supporters began a poster campaign showing Rajapakshe kneeling before Amma and seeking her apology with a prayer “Oh Mother! I committed a great blunder; Forgive me; Give me life!” What they imagined or rather expected that should happen was in the posters. You may call it fantasy!  Is it the way to portray the leader of a neighbouring country with whom India shares social, cultural and civilizational values even from the time of Asoka the Great?  And mind you, this is even as you are protesting against an offensive article at the website of the Sri Lankan government which was promptly deleted.

Why this extremely acrimonious mindset when it comes to Tamil Nadu with its neighbouring country where a sizeable section of Tamils live who are bona fide citizens of that country. People of West Bengal and Bangladesh share the same language. It is not as if Bangladeshi Hindus are hunky dory about their living conditions though there was no civil war as in Sri Lanaka. But there is no whimper of protest from West Bengal even when Hindus were driven out and their temples were destroyed. The same thing can be said about Punjab or North-East sharing the border with Pakistan and Burma.

One plausible reason could be that with the emergence of Dravidian politics around the middle of the last century, the entire political architecture was revolving around Tamil language, its history, literature and uniqueness. There was no other agenda, economic or political. The entire political agenda was about language and we all know what happened in 1967. It was just the language that unseated Congress and even after four decades, the party is unable to recover the lost ground. Dravidian parties found an emotive issue in Tamil language, and as part of its cultural cleansing, they ridiculed all our epics and appropriated Ravana as Dravidian king and wanted to erase all traces of Hinduism from the state under the guise of rationalism and under the stewardship of EV Ramaswamy Naickar, followed by C N Annadurai and the likes of Karunanidhi.

After capturing power, the baby (i.e. language) cannot be allowed to be thrown away with the bath water. They had to sustain the language bogey. That was the time the Tamils in Sri Lanka raised a banner of revolt against the Sri Lankan government for treating them as second class citizens vis-à-vis the majority Sinhalese. Dravidian parties extended full support to them, allowed them to have their training camps in Tamil Nadu and mobilized the sentiments of Tamils for the cause of Sri Lankan Tamils who migrated to island nation as labour force in Tea estates centuries ago.  The geography of the area is also such that it enabled people to embark or disembark through the sea in an ordinary boat in an hour’s time. No passport, no visa and in a way it has become a free zone.

Further, seeds of secession are deeply laid in the psyche of Dravidian politics though they might not have sprouted. That is the reason their utterances have that tinge of separate identity and treat Sri Lanka as enemy nation of Tamil Nadu without identifying themselves with the national interest of the country and expecting the nation’s foreign policy to be seen through the prism of Sri Lankan Tamil interests. They don’t even take note of the fact that both China and Pakistan had acquired a strategic foothold in Sri Lanka in their ulterior objective for encircling India. Pakistan already took back a diplomat from Colombo because of his links with terrorist groups. ISI is using Sri Lankan base to infiltrate into Tamil Nadu and the proof, if you need proof at all, lies in some Tamil youth wearing T shirts with IS logo and assassination of many Hindu leaders in the recent past.

This is not to argue that no injustice was done to innocent Sri Lankan Tamils. They did suffer the worst effects of civil war.  But what led to the civil war? Was it not the result of terror unleashed by LTTE over the island nation including the multiple assassinations of not only Sri Lankan leaders but our own former Prime Minister? Can we expect the Sri Lankan  government to deal with such terror outfits with kid gloves. Won’t we love to have the head of Hafeez Syed? We banned SIMI and are hunting naxalites. But we expect different standards from Sri Lanka. Our national security interest demands that India should improve its diplomatic relations with Sri Lanka instead of pandering to the very narrow interests of chauvinistic  Dravdian politicians who can be easily defined as “Linguistic Terrorists” who are blinded enough not to see what is happening around.