Stalin Calls Upon Women to Ensure DMK’s Victory

Chennai: Calling upon women to ensure the victory of DMK in 2026 as the party needed one more term in office to take women’s development to the next level through the continuation of the plethora of welfare programmes like the monthly assistance to the poor, free bus travel and Pudhumai Penn scheme, Chief Minister M K Stalin termed the BJP government as anti-women since it had curtailed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, in which 86 percent of the beneficiaries were women.

Speaking at the ‘Triumphant Tamil Women’ conference organized by the party’s women’s wing of the western region on Monday at Palladam in Tirupur district, Stalin accused the BJP of bringing in a Bill to ensure 33 percent reservation for women in State Assemblies and Parliament with several conditions that had created a scenario akin to the old adage, ‘operation success, patient dead.’

Taking a swipe at AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami for supporting the BJP for bringing those retrograde changes to the 100-day work scheme (MGNREGS) and claiming falsely that the number of minimum work days had gone up to 125, Stalin said that under the Union BJP government the people were getting just about 47 days of work under the scheme and now it would also be lost in the new format.

Only by overcoming such impediments and betrayals the DMK government was ruling the State so successfully that the entire nation was looking at it for inspiration for no other government had given so much importance to women, he said, adding that what had happened so far was only tip of the iceberg as there was more in store in the Dravidian Model 2.0 rule.

For those programmes to be implemented, women should campaign for the DMK as they alone could go beyond the doorways to capture the hearts of women in the households and explain to them the achievements of the DMK government in women’s welfare and development, he said.

Listing out the various progressive measures taken by the Dravidian movement over the past century to uplift women, Stalin referred to the recent diktat by some groups on Rajasthan banning women from using the mobile phone and said that in Tamil Nadu the entire assembly line of a sprawling iphone manufacturing unit was filled with only women employees.

Women in the State had made such rapid progress socially due to the Dravidian movement’s continuous efforts on various fronts like abolition of the Devadasi system, bringing in a legislation to give property rights for women, raised questions on the reason for women’s slavery and fought for their rights to education and equality, he said.

It was the awareness created by the Dravidian movement that had led to the situation in which all political parties gave representation for women now though even some developed nations were unable to achieve such gender equality, he said.