‘Mahatma also spent time in jails’
On most days, Thirumurugan Gandhi has to appear at one of Chennai’s multiple courts to present his side in multiple ongoing cases against him. On some days, all he does is move from one court to another. This takes a long time if he is walking as he is stopped for selfies every few metres. Gandhi is a familiar face in Chennai. He made his name by leading a movement, called May 17, to advocate for the rights of the minority Tamil population of Sri Lanka. “On May 17, 2009, a genocide happened in Sri Lanka in which 40,000 people were killed according to UN experts’ report. Our movement began on the same day. Today it has thousands of volunteers,” said Gandhi, waiting for a hearing to begin at the district court in Chennai. He is referring to the final months of the decades-long civil war between ethnic separatist rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan state. While the Sri Lankan army has refuted these numbers, the government set up a Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Committee in 2010.
Over the years, the May 17 movement has expanded to represent voices of a wide range of disenfranchised groups, from Kashmir to Catalonia, through speeches, sit-ins, agitations and candle light vigils. The charges against Thirumurugan have also piled up along the way: sedition, hate speech, promoting enmity between different groups, and organising protests in violation of regulatory orders. He was last arrested in 2018 while on his way back from Geneva where he spoke at the United Nations Human Rights Council against the police firing in Thoothukudi on people resisting the expansion of Sterlite Industries’ copper-smelter plant over pollution concerns. A day after the May 22, 2018 firing in which 13 people died, the state government constituted an inquiry commission and ordered the closure of the plant. Arrested on the charge of sedition, Thirumurugan spent 55 days in jail. “Mahatma Gandhi also spent a lot of his time in jails,” he said.
His father was named Gandhi by his grandfather, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and a member of the Congress party. Encouraged to find his own political icons, Thirumurugan settled on Periyar, BR Ambedkar (Dalit icon and who steered the writing of the Constitution), Karl Marx and Prabhakaran, LTTE’s guerilla leader. He didn’t name Mahatma Gandhi even though Gram Swarajya, a collection of Gandhi’s writings on rural living, was one of the first books his father gave him. “He is certainly an inspiration to the movement. He challenged British imperialism. He connected with the common people. He didn’t brand anyone as personal enemy. He believed in discussion. Everyone could take part in his movements,” he said.
But Thirumurugan questions Gandhi’s political philosophy. “He didn’t ask for the abolition of caste system,” he said. As a follower of Periyar, this Gandhi feels the answers to many of the world’s problems today lie in the Dravidian movement.