CHIEF MINISTER STALIN, PLEASE RESPECT HINDU SENTIMENTS

75 years after India was partitioned on the basis of the specious of religion, the discrimination evident since colonial times of Hindu places of worship being controlled by the state continues. Someday, when forensic methods and their utilisation improve, there will need to be a comprehensive investigation as to when and how temple wealth has been looted during this period. There are private homes and even museums dotted across the world that possess idols that were clandestinely removed from multiple temples. Global auction houses used to ignore the provenance of such items in their hurry to make a profit at the expense of the desecrated temple. Of course, auction houses and buyers often being from western countries, neither the BBC nor CNN nor any of the many media channels that expend considerable time and effort in blackening the reputation of a certain community in India are at all concerned about such an attack on religious beliefs compounded by theft. There have been politicians of influence in India who have in the past connived with such auction houses and protected the temple thieves rather than devotees whose only crime was that they belonged to a community that was widely seen as an easy, costless target for attack. Given that secularism means equal treatment of all faiths, it is worth noting that those who swore to promote that philosophy were themselves responsible for getting passed several laws and instituted multiple regulations that discriminated against what is termed in India the “majority community”. Of course, whether it be the BBC or CNN, blatant discrimination against a particular community has always been ignored. Contrast this with the frenzy in such channels about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which explicitly has zero effect on citizens belonging to the “minority community” in India.

In actual fact, the CAA ought to have been named “Protection of Minorities Act”, for that is what it does, to protect the alarmingly diminishing number of minorities in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the case of Afghanistan, almost all the Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh population has been erased, as has happened almost as completely in Pakistan, with Bangladesh following the same path to silence from those media outlets that trumpet stories about “imminent genocide of minorities” in India, a country where the minority population has never dipped but only grown in 75 years, to reach 230 million and growing healthily every year, including since 2014 when Narendra Modi took over as the Prime Minister as a consequence of ensuring that the BJP secured a secure majority of seats in the Lok Sabha elections held that year. The only way India can become a secular nation in practice is to ensure that temples are liberated from state control. Over the years, the misuse of donations from Hindus to state-controlled temples has reached alarming levels. Instead of being spent on improving the facilities for the pilgrims, much of the money in temples in several states including Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu gets spent on matters that completely leave out the interests of the believers.

Chief Minister Stalin needs to understand that a lot has changed in India, including in Tamil Nadu, since the time Chief Minister Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai died and the mantle of leadership of the government was handed over to Muthuvel Karunanidhi, who was affectionately nicknamed “Mr Eleven Lakhs from Saidapet” by Annadurai. In the 1967 state assembly polls, it was that contribution by a single DMK member which enabled the DMK to fuel its rise to power in the state. Since then, the attitude of DMK cadres towards religion has changed. Social media in particular has been inquisitive and intrusive, and siphoning off temple wealth for non-devotional purposes will have a political impact, including during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, where Stalin plans to sweep the polls together with the Congress Party, led in the state by P. Chidambaram and his energetic son Karthi. Leaders in the DMK such as the favourite child of the late “Kalaignar”, as Karunanidhi was called by his millions of adoring followers, Kanimozhi, should ensure that temple wealth be spent in the manner sought by devotees. Kanimozhi and other modern elements must understand the pain of devotees who see their temples stripped of wealth by politicians and officials uncaring of their feelings and needs. It is time for the DMK to reverse course before the situation worsens even further.