BJP wants to eliminate Tamil: Stalin

Chennai:The Union BJP government was out to destroy Tamil and other Indian languages with the aid of dominant languages, Hindi and Sanskrit, by cutting down the financial aid for the development of Tamil as they had done with the funds meant for the State without bothering about the consequences of language imposition, Chief Minister M K Stalin said on Wednesday.

In his eighth instalment of the epistle to cadre stressing on the need to fight dominant languages, Stalin said that while world history would enlighten the rulers on what happened to those who imposed languages, two false propagandas were being carried out in India. One was that Hindi was the national language and that it should not be neglected and the second one was that Sanskrit was a seminal language from which the rest of the mother tongues in the country originated, he said.

Clarifying that Hindi was only an official language along with English, he said that Tamil had nothing to do with Sanskrit as its distinguishing characteristics were quintessential with no connection to the dominant language Sanskrit that even Lok Sabha Speaker Om Prakash Birla was propagating.

The extraordinary importance given to the two dominant languages was aimed at treating people speaking other languages in the country as second class citizens, he said. Quoting statistics obtained from the Union Education Ministry, Stalin said that the allocation of funds for research on Classical Tamil in the 10 years from 2014 to 2023 was a mere 7 percent of what had been spent on promoting Sanskrit during the same period, which amounted to a whopping Rs 2,435 crore, he said.

Such a vast discrepancy on the fund allocation for the two languages had proved that the BJP leaders were enemies of Tamil, he said and added that several researches had proved that Tamil did not originate from Sanskrit but was from the Dravidian family of languages, which was first expounded by Robert Caldwell.

If Caldwell was a European and need not be taken seriously, could the findings of other Tamil scholars starting from Parithimar Kalaignar, who changed his original name of Suryanarayana Sastri, to the head of the World Tamil Research Institute R Balakrishnan too be ignored, he asked.

Tracing the history of the reorganization of States based on the mother tongue of the people, he said that when an attempt was made to create a Dakshin Pradesh, a province of people speaking many languages in south India, the DMK had vehemently opposed it and insisted on the formation of States based on the language spoken there.

Pointing out that Hindi was not the mother tongue of the majority of the people in the country and hence not qualified to be the national language, he said the DMK’s objective was to fight for language equality.