Palaniswami had found comfort in leading a slave’s life when Periyar E V Ramasamy, founder of the Dravidian movement, had said that a life of self-respect as the best way to live, the deputy chief minister said, adding that the AIADMK leader had become a betrayer of the minorities as he stood by the BJP when it tried to incite riots in Madurai recently.
Chennai: Accusing ‘sanghis’ of being obsessed with the idea of preventing children from oppressed, minority and backward communities gaining education and coming up in life, Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin said that though the BJP government had cancelled the scholarships of minority students, the DMK government, led by M K Stalin, was paying them a monthly scholarship of Rs 1,000 to all students in Classes one to eight.
Speaking at the silver jubilee celebrations of the Social Justice Students’ Movement, a wing of the TMMK, at Valluvar Kottam on Monday, Udhyanidhi Stalin took on the AIADMK by recalling that party’s general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami telling the people during the Lok Sabha elections that his party would never again align with the BJP.
Palaniswami had found comfort in leading a slave’s life when Periyar E V Ramasamy, founder of the Dravidian movement, had said that a life of self-respect as the best way to live, the deputy chief minister said, adding that the AIADMK leader had become a betrayer of the minorities as he stood by the BJP when it tried to incite riots in Madurai recently.
The DMK had stood by the minorities and would continue to do so, he said, listing out the various measures successive DMK governments had taken for the benefit of the community like providing 3.5 per cent reservation and including Urdu-speaking Muslims in the OBC list, besides giving scholarships to rural women worth Rs five crore.
Stalin also mentioned the similarities between the social justice students’ movement and the DMK’s youth wing by citing the past agitations that they had taken together like protest against the bid to entrust the appointment of vice chancellors in state-run university with the UGC in 2025 and to oppose Governor R N Ravi’s machinations.
That unity of the DMK youth wing and the social justice students movement had given a nightmare to the ‘sanghis’ and hence the unity should continue, he said. On a personal note, Udhayanidhi Stalin said that the first protest that he took part in and courted arrest was the one against the CAA.
