‘Attack on Tamil culture’: As Rahul Gandhi joins ‘Jana Nayagan’ chorus, backs Vijay, what it means amid strain in DMK-Congress ties

Gandhi’s intervention is politically interesting as it comes at a time when there is a perceived strain in Congress-DMK ties over demands by a section of the Tamil Nadu Congress leaders for a larger role for the grand old party in the DMK-led alliance. They want the DMK to allocate more seats for the party to contest in the coming Assembly elections and a share in power in the event of the alliance returning to power. Then there was talk by some Congress leaders in private about weighing the options of scouting for alternative partners such as Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK). The DMK has already ruled out sharing power with allies, angering a section of the Congress.

The LoP is in Tamil Nadu on Tuesday to attend the golden jubilee celebrations of St Thomas English High School in Gudalur in the Nilgiris district. He had visited the school during his Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022 and halted there for the night.

DMK leader and Chief Minister M K Stalin has been the target of Vijay’s attacks ever since he entered politics. The superstar has, however, shied away from targeting the BJP.

Congress anger over another movie

In recent days, a section of Congress leaders, while coming out in support of Vijay’s movie, targeted the movie Parasakthi that has been produced by a member of the DMK first family, accusing it of showing the party in a poor light. The film focuses on the anti-Hindi agitation and student movement of the 1960s when the Indira Gandhi government was in power at the Centre.

The Tamil Nadu Youth Congress on Monday said the “entire film is built on the filmmakers’ own fabricated imagination and is completely contrary to historical truth, with the sole intention of attacking the Indian National Congress through lies and distortions”.

“In 1965, the Congress government never officially announced that Post Office forms must be filled only in Hindi across all states. This is a complete fabrication deliberately created to malign our party. The film depicts a fictional scene in which Sivakarthikeyan meets the Iron Lady Indira Gandhi and thereafter portrays her as speaking in a villainous manner,” Youth Congress leader Arun Bhaskar said in a statement.

“The foolish team that produced this film seems completely unaware that the law does not permit the imaginary portrayal of deceased national leaders in events that never occurred in history. They have recklessly created scenes that have no historical basis whatsoever. Taking this distortion even further, the film falsely shows Indira Gandhi visiting Coimbatore on February 12, 1965, a visit that never took place. It then fabricates scenes of a train being set on fire in her presence and portrays her as accepting signatures against Hindi imposition. None of these events ever happened in history, and depicting them is highly condemnable,” said the statement.

“At the end of the film, during the end credits, real photographs of our leaders — K Kamaraj, Indira Gandhi, and the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri — are shown, accompanied by an utterly baseless claim that the Congress party shot and killed more than 200 Tamil people in Pollachi. This accusation is made without a shred of evidence and deliberately portrays our party and our leaders with false and defamatory data. Apart from this, scenes showing the burning of the Congress flag have also been forcibly inserted into the film,” it said.

The Youth Congress demanded that “all scenes in Parasakthi movie that depict events which never occurred in history must be removed immediately” and that the film’s production team tender a public apology, failing which “strict legal action will be initiated against the filmmakers.”