Don’t Play With Fire, CM Stalin Tells PM Modi
Addressing a campaign rally at Vellore on Tuesday when he canvassed votes for four DMK candidates, including party general secretary Duraimurugan
Chennai: Hours after issuing the ‘final warning’ to the Union BJP Government against messing up with Tamil Nadu through the delimitation amendment, DMK president and Chief Minister M K Stalin told Prime Minister Narendra Modi not to play with fire, raising the question how dare his colleague and Union Minister Piyush Goyal would call the people of Tamil Nadu illiterates.
Addressing a campaign rally at Vellore on Tuesday when he canvassed votes for four DMK candidates, including party general secretary Duraimurugan, contesting from Katpadi, and a DMDK candidate in the region, Stalin said he was raising his voice of protest against the domination of New Delhi from the very soil that saw the maiden uprising against British rule.
He said that the State was facing the present election at an unique time when it was being penalized through the process of delimitation for its success in implementing family planning programmes that were highly essential to pull the country out of the poverty and hunger that it was reeling from during independence.
When the call for limiting population growth was given, the south Indian States complied with it but were being punished for it now through the BJP government’s delimitation plan, against which he had already given the final warning to Modi, he said.
Responding to it, Piyush Goyal had called the people of Tamil Nadu as ‘illiterates,’ Stalin said, hitting out at him, saying that he might be in-charge for the BJP in the State but should know how to get respect by giving it and refrain from misjudging the people of the State.
Stalin told Modi to not judge the people of the State based on those who stood before him with folded hands since they were intelligent people who were self-respectors who would give it back to those dishonouring them.
Cautioning the BJP against taking the people of the State for granted and thinking that they did not have their leaders like Periyar E V Ramasamy, K Kamaraj, C N Annadurai and M Karunanidhi now to fight for them, he said that he was there to take up the cudgels for them and fight till his last breath.
Recalling the DMK protesting against the CAA under his leadership during AIADMK rule and that then Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami arresting 8000 of them, he said that Palaniswami had no principles and ideology and did not know anything about Dravdian ideology or Annadurai.
Taking advantage of Palaniswami’s ignorance, the BJP was planning to enter Tamil Nadu under the guise of NDA but that trick would not work in the State since Dravidian blood ran through the veins of the people, he said, while warning the people that every vote they cast for the AIADMK would be for the BJP.
