DMK Reminds Annamalai Of Dravidian Movement's Violent History

On 15 May 2022, in a meeting held to impress people with whatever the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government is said to have achieved in one year, R S Bharati who was DMK member of the Upper House of Parliament, warned the Bharatiya Janata Party state head K Annamalai that he would have to face the same situation as Kirupananda Variyar.

This was a reminder of a shameful event enacted by DMK cadres.

It is a well-known fact in history that movements that operate on the hatred of the 'other' naturally tend to lean towards fascism. They feed on hatred and violence. One such movement is the Dravidianist movement spearheaded by the DMK.

In a way, Dravidianist racial hatred is even more perverse than the anti-Semitism of Christendom because here Hindus were made to hate their Hindu nature and then target a particular community of their own as 'a cunning outsider'; even though that community usually confined itself to performing rituals in a decentralised, non-institutional manner.

While the Dravidianists speak of preserving the greatness of Tamil, they seem averse to everything and everyone that are working to make Tamil Nadu great.

One such person was Thirumuruga Kirupananda Variyar Swamigal (1906-1993). Swamigal was a venerable ocean of knowledge. He spoke to crowds of thousands — children, women, elderly men, youth, educated and uneducated — without a single note in his hand, without a single scrap of paper before him. But he would mesmerise his audience not with empty rhetoric as Dravidianist leaders used to do — but with the quintessence of Hindu darshanas as it manifests in Tamil literature.

His simplicity masked his in-depth understanding of Dharma and sacred literature.

Dravidianists dreaded Variyar Swamigal because he represented authentic Tamil culture while the Dravidianists — starting from E V Ramasamy to C N Annadurai to M Karunanidhi — presented a cultural counterfeit.

In 1972, Karunanidhi was the chief minister. The members of DMK thought that it was a good time to settle scores with Variyar Swamigal. Let us know what happened through the words of Variyar Swamigal himself as narrated in his autobiography.

Actually there was nothing wrong in what Variyar Swamigal had spoken. It is one school of thought that when the time for death comes none can save a person. But what is important here is the way the Dravidianist goon had to seek forgiveness from the very Swamigal he had attacked for whatever ignorant, irrational Dravidian model of reasoning.

Many political observers feel that at a time when the DMK rule is seen as displaying disturbing anti-Hindu stands on various issues, a senior Dravidianist politician unwittingly reminding Hindus of the violence of Dravidianist cadres against a venerable Hindu saint as well as a true Tamil scholar draws a parallel between Variyar Swamigal and Annamalai. That, in itself, is a boost to Hindu sanghatanist forces in Tamil Nadu.

And when the time comes, one can be sure that Annamalai too would be showing the same grand gesture of Hindu forgiveness to R S Bharathi.