Those disrupting integration real anti-nationals: Tamil Nadu CM

Chennai: Those who destroy the country’s multi-cultural fabric, borne out of its diverse languages, and those who disrupted national integration were the real anti-national elements, Chief Minister M K Stalin said, responding to the allegation of some BJP leaders that the assertion of language rights by Tamil Nadu was an anti-national act.

Continuing his series of letters illuminating his party cadre on the history of ‘Mozhi Por’ (Language War), Stalin said on Friday that whenever the DMK, dedicated to the cause of protecting the mother tongue Tamil and the rights of the people, embarked on the war path, leaders in North India would get their jitters and that was the reason for branding the latest fight against Hindi imposition as anti-national.

The fourth of the epistles under the title ‘Will oppose Hindi imposition anytime,’ traced the history of the Language War to 1937 when the then premier R Rajagopalachari made Hindi compulsory in schools, provoking a massive protest led by Periyar E V Ramasamy that saw 73 women with babes in arms going to jail and forcing the British Governor to withdraw the proposal in 1939.

With Periyar lodged in Bellary prison and C N Annadurai in Saidapet sub-jail, the protest stoked the Tamil feelings of the people and the fight against Hindi was still continuing even after seeing two subsequent language wars, one in 1948 and the other in 1965, he said, adding that in the 75 years of its existence, the DMK party had seen it all, fighting in multiple theatres of war, facing oppression, court cases and jail terms and even life sacrifices.

Explaining the various attempts made in Parliament to make Hindi the language of governance in the past and how Tamil Nadu managed to follow the two-language policy after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru gave a written assurance to DMK MP E V K Sampath that Hindi would not be imposed as long as the people of the on-Hindi States asked for it, he said that the first call to give importance to all languages was made by DMK MPs Sampath and Tiruvannamalai Tharumalingam.

The Parliament was told that since India was a sub-continent whose landscape had people speaking a variety of languages, by imposing it on the entire nation, some people would enjoy an advantage of having their mother tongue as official language while for others it would be an alien language.

In the same note a reply was given to those questioning the making of English as official language by explaining to them that English was an alien tongue for the whole of India and no one would have an advantage by adopting it.

Stalin told the cadre to ask those who would say that Hindi, too, was a language and what was wrong in learning it, if it was okay to substitute Sanskrit with Tamil, which was also a classical language, in temple liturgy.