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Karunanidhi tilts at Kanchi seers, imbues railway function with controversy

N Sathiya Moorthy in Kanchipuram

The two sankaracharyas of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam stayed away from a railway function in Kanchipuram on Wednesday, following Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi's objection to an "exclusive invitation" for leaders of a particular religion.

However, Tamil Nadu Transport Minister K Ponmudi, and the religious heads of Christianity and Islam, who were added to the list of chief guests after Karunanidhi's objection, participated.

What should have passed off as one more public function with no significance outside the temple-town of Pallava days, became a political row after Karunanidhi raised the issue in the state assembly, at the commencement of the winter session on Monday. The state transport minister would boycott the function if the railways did not make amends to what he saw as a non-secular act, he stated.

The railways did make amends. It invited Reverend Martin J Philip, the Kanchipuram bishop of the Church of South India, and also Janab K S Aslam Basha, president of the local Jamma Masjid. Southern Railway also printed fresh invitations with their names, and included them in the quarter-page newspaper advertisements taken out on Wednesday.

The two religious heads attended the function, in which Railway Minister Nitish Kumar inaugurated the 63-km Kanchipuram-Arakkonam BG line. However, the Hindu pontiff, Jayendra Saraswati and his heir-apparent, Sankara Vijayendra Saraswati stayed away, after maintaining calm all through the two-day controversy.

"It is an insult to the Hindu community," said S Rajagopalan of Kanchipuram at the site of the railway function. "The chief minister has made a wanton attack on the Hindu community, without any necessity whatsoever," he says, referring to the DMK's traditional anti-Hindu, anti-brahmin and anti-god political line.

"If someone thought that the DMK and Karunanidhi have changed their line, there is no proof of that," adds K Rangaswamy Mudaliar, another frequent visitor to the Kanchi Mutt. In this context, he refers to the DMK government's revived stand on Tamil archanas (prayers) in Hindu temples, and Karunanidhi's own admiration of Ravana in recent times.

"Will the state government apply the same yardstick and direct that the five-time daily prayers in the state's mosques will all be conducted only in Tamil, not Urdu?" asks Mudaliar, adding that any government interference in religious beliefs and administration should be "beneficial, not controversial".

In this context, Hindus, particularly the more vocal `Hindutva parivar' in the state make a pointed reference to the railway's own explanation. They had invited a Christian priest for a similar function at Alappuzha in Kerala, where no religious leader from other communities or denominations were called.

Similarly, Southern Railway had invited another Hindu savant, Bangaru Adigalar of Melmaruvathur, near Madras, for the inauguration of the local railway station. No other religious head was invited, and there were no complaints, either.

Asks Rajagopalan, his Iyengar-brahminical forehead marks all too visible: "Is it because the sankaracharyas are wrongly construed as the pontiffs only of brahmins that the DMK is opposed to them? Or, was it because they did not know that Bangaru Adigalar, a non-brahmin pontiff of what's mostly a non-brahmin following, too had been invited for a similar function on an earlier occasion?"

"The chief minister's utterances will only deepen the communal wounds, and divert the casteist issues to a forgotten direction," says Rajagopalan, who had been a political activist at one time, not anymore. "If by this diversionary tactics, the government thinks it can try and unite the numerically stronger castes, against an 'old enemy', it is sadly mistaken. It can add one more angle, without ending any other."

In the Tamil Nadu of 'post-Coimbatore blasts' era, the Hindus, cutting across caste lines, see in the government's new-found love for Tamil, an attempt by the ruling DMK to play religion-oriented vote bank politics. "I thought that the 'Coimbatore blasts', like the Rajiv Gandhi assassination before it, as far as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam went, was yet another eye-opener, but that doesn't seem to be so," says M Senthamizhselvi, 26, a graduate-housewife from Vellore.

Though not aligned to any political party -- "I did not even cast my vote in the Lok Sabha poll" -- Senthamizhselvi says any over-reaction on the part of the government would only generate similar over-reaction by the majority community.

"We can do without all that," she adds in chaste Tamil, clarifying that she too visited the sankaracharyas, though she was not a brahmin.

For his part, Karunanidhi has repeatedly stated that he had nothing personal against the sankaracharyas, and respected them as much as he respected any other religious leader.

Near-similar statements of the type, he made in the assembly, both on Monday and later on Tuesday. Other political parties and their MLAs were caught napping when the issue was first raised by Communist Party of India member K Subbaroyan, who seems to have the knack of asking all issues for which the government seemed to have a ready answer.

"This need not have been made an issue at all," G K Moopanar, leader of the DMK's Tamil Maanila Congress ally said, when his reaction was sought on Karunanidhi's threat for the state government to boycott the function. However, the TMC leader of the Opposition, S Balasubramaniam seemed to flounder on the first day, but took a similar line subsequently.

The DMK's new-found old love for 'pan-Dravidian causes', in which Hinduism, Hindu gods, brahmins and Sanskrit have been at the receiving end, seems to have been dictated by political calculations, if not compulsions. The party seems less confident of striking a 'mutually-profitable political deal' with the BJP, ruling the Centre, and this has necessitated the DMK to prove its forgotten pan-Dravidian credential with redoubled vigour.

The failure of the A B Vajpayee government, as perceived by the DMK, has also emboldened the DMK into considering a future course independent of the BJP, should the latter break away from its AIADMK ally.

"Possibly, the DMK is playing hard to get for the BJP, without having to say so in plain words," says a TMC leader. "And by posturing against the 'Hindutva ideology', Karunanidhi is also trying to win back the minority votes that have drifted away from the DMK."

The DMK seems lately convinced about the possibility of the Third Front taking a final shape after the assembly election, and getting accepted by the Congress, in turn. "Any Congress-Left tie-up, on which the DMK counts upon, would also imply a war on the 'anti-secular acts of the BJP and its government at the Centre', and the DMK seems to be preparing the ground for that," says another informed source.

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