I&B Ministry's Attempt to Block Jana Nayagan Attack on Tamil Culture: Rahul
His remarks come a day after the producer of the Tamil film Jana Nayagan approached the Supreme Court, challenging an interim order of the Madras High Court that stayed a single-judge direction to grant the CBFC clearance to the movie
Chennai: Finally, after Congress honchos, one after the other, expressed solidarity with Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) president Vijay for the denial of certification for his latest film, ‘Jana Nayagan,’ by the censor board, their leader Rahul Gandhi, on Tuesday, said the attempt to block the movie was an attack on Tamil culture, pushing his party’s decade long alliance with the DMK to the brink.
‘Mr Modi, you will never succeed in suppressing the voice of the Tamil people,’ Rahul Gandhi said in his message on X, which sounded more like a death knell for the Congress-DMK alliance that has been hanging fire ever since Congress leaders started talking recently about power sharing and more number of seats to contest the coming Assembly elections.
But ever since Jana Nayagan ran into trouble with the Censors, Congress MPs and leaders have been raising their voice in support of Vijay from January 8. While Praveen Chakrvarty, chairman of Professionals’ Congress and Data Analytics, who said that the TVK had grown into a popular political party, accused Modi of insulting Tamil people, Girsh Chodankar, the AICC in charge of Tamil Nadu, told Modi that his politics of intimidation would not work in Tamil Nadu
Congress whip in the Lok Sabha, Manickam Tagore said that after ED, CBI, IT the Censor Board had been turned into a frontal organ to silence dissent. ‘Democracy cannot survive when art is forced to kneel before power,’ he said while his colleague in Lok Sabha, Jothimani, said the denial of certification was an attack on the Tamil film world.
That cacophony of support to ‘Jana Nayagan’ actually followed an earlier outburst by Congress leaders over power sharing. Manickam Tagore had then said coalition politics was the reality by quoting the results of an IPDS (Indian Political Democratic Strategies) survey that gave 3.10 percent of vote share to his party.
The Virudhunagar MP also said that no one can win an election without an alliance as every party had its own vote share, which was only a reiteration of the stand of Congress leaders for quite some time making subtle demands for share in power.
Though Girish Chodankar had started it all some time back by saying that the Congress had grown phenomenally in the State and hence would seek share in power, he himself withdrew the claim later saying that the alliance was on the right track.
When Tagore’s tweet exacerbated the controversy, DMK organization secretary R S Bharati said that when the alliance between the two parties, which had stood the test of time by winning several elections in a row, was struck there was no talk of power sharing and if it had to be discussed it could be done only at the level of DMK president M K Stalin and Rahul Gandhi.
It is learnt that the DMK had already told the Congress that there was no scope for power sharing in the State and that there could be only negotiations on seat sharing but the alliance leader could not entertain demands for an exorbitant number of seats.
The concept of power sharing is not part of the State's political tradition, in which major parties never gave ministerial berths to minor allies, and it was Vijay, who mooted the idea at the launch of his political party more than a year ago. So it is natural for the Congress to drift towards the TVK now.