Karuna plays Tamil card with gusto

At two rallies in Thanjavur and Tiruchirappalli in the last couple of days, Karunanidhi declared that he would work for the Tamils till his last breath, The good performance of the DMK rule in the last five years was to uplift the “Tamils, the Dravidians,” he said.

Referring to the plight of the Tamils in Northern Sri Lanka, Karunanidhi said if their struggle had such a tragic end and Tamil Eelam not realised, it was due to their “internecine fratricide.”

“I had warned of this situation long ago; nobody listened to my words. But it is not new for Tamil society to go down and rise again. Tamil society is still indestructible. We as a front are seeking your mandate to make Tamils live decently,” he said at Thanjavur.

At the Tiruchirappally rally on Friday, the DMK leader was even more assertive in eulogising a Tamil wave that was pitted against opposition parties in Tamil Nadu (referring to the AIADMK-led front).

He came down heavily on the Election Commission’s (EC) inflexible rules that allegedly helped the opposition party in Tamil Nadu.  Karunanidhi cautioned the EC to function impartially in view of the Madras High Court’s recent strictures against the commission.

Referring to the puranic story of Mahabali who had to go down and under to the nether world after he had promised to give three paces of earth to Lord Vishnu, Karunanidhi saw in it a parallel to the current poll developments in Tamil Nadu, as a tussle between the Aryan and Non-Aryan forces.  

“Those trying to prevent me from becoming chief minister again are those forces who are opposed to the Dravidian Movement, who want to flatten our movement working for the upliftment of the Tamil people,” Karunanidhi said.

“But this is not Kerala; this is Tamil Nadu where the seeds of the rationalist and Dravidian Movement were sown by Periyar,” Karunanidhi said.