DMK-Congress Campaign In Tamil Nadu Is Casually Demeaning Women And Both Parties Seem To Be Okay With It

A few days before, the notorious party-hopper from Tamil Nadu, Nanjil Sampath, while campaigning for Congress, spoke of Pondicherry Governor Kiran Bedi as ‘a person whose gender is unknown’:

Nanjil Sampath is a product of Dravidianism, and not many will be surprised at the crudeness and perversion with which average Dravidianist political orators and ideologues speak about women.

Many Dravidian storm-troopers get a kick out of an urban legend about one of their tallest leaders, C N Annaduarai, who, when asked about his relation to a well-known actress of that time, said in rhyming Tamil that he was no saint who had conquered desires nor was she a chaste woman.

In a recorded biographical anecdote, EVR, the original Dravidian demagogue, wanted to discourage his wife from going to a temple. So what did he do? Did he win her with his arguments? No. Instead, he went to his ruffian friends, told them that she was a new Dasi who had come to town, and told them to win her over. As the ruffians started stalking her, the frightened wife hurried back home. Traumatised, she stopped going to temple.

M Karunanidhi was appreciated by many of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) cadres for the crude double-meaning insults he had thrown at the women politicians of the opposition. M K Stalin, too, had made crude remarks at Jayalalithaa.

While MGR refrained from making such comments against women politicians and with Jayalalithaa herself facing some of the worst taunts in politics, neither of them ever attacked other women in a sexist way. However, the same cannot be said about the street-orators of AIADMK. The women of the Karunanidhi family were special targets of the obscene diatribe of these orators. Nanjil Sampath himself had made such comments when he was in the AIADMK.

Given the fact that the Dravidianist cadre and leaders grow up in such a culture, it is not surprising that their top campaigners habitually talk ill of women. During the #metoo campaign, DMK leaders Radha Ravi made double-meaning disparaging remarks against the singer Chinmayi. Chinmayi being an Iyyengar made her a legitimate target for the Dravidianists. In October 2018, Ravi spoke in a film function and targeted the female singer. The video went viral among the Dravidianists:

One lone voice from the Dravidianist side that came out strongly against such demeaning of women was that of Dr Shalini, a psychiatrist who subscribes to the Dravidianist ideology.

It is not that Radha Ravi’s recent comments on Nayantara were any more repulsive than his comments on Chinmayi. Yet, given election time, and the need to garner women sympathy, the DMK supremo, being aware of the image of DMK in the average Tamil mind, suspended Radha Ravi from the party. However, the diatribe against Pondicherry Governor Kiran Bedi, by a star DMK campaigner campaigning for INC, appears to have been excused by both the DMK and the Congress.

Simultaneously, and paradoxically, the Dravidianist discourse boasts of feminist ammunition in its armoury. This trend set in particularly after Kanimozhi, a ‘poetess’ of sorts, started making herself popular in left-dominated literary circles. Her ‘poetry’ often aped the feminist body-based poetry trope and typical clichéd anger statements.

Mediocre at best, she and a horde of Kanimozhi-clone poetesses started receiving accolades in circles of power. With selective outrage, these poetesses would target Hindu symbols, national symbols and pen down propaganda. One such ‘poetess’ wrote that she wanted to urinate on Indian democracy.

Recently, while this class of poetesses was totally silent on a series of murderous sex offences against children in convents and Christian orphanages in Tamil Nadu, it zeroed in on an alleged sexual offence in an institution that seemed to have a Hindu name (though seems not to have been run by any Hindu organisation). Pat came the ‘poem’ from the ‘poetess’ asking where had ‘your male God gone’ and speculating if the male God had gone to rape a female Goddess in the sanctum of some temple.

When ordinary Hindus emotionally react to such provocations, their reactions are shown by establishment feminists as Hindutva harassment of women. Thus, gender-based offence and abuse has been institutionalised by Dravidianists in Tamil Nadu into a fine art and science.

The Congress in Tamil Nadu once had leaders like Kamaraj, Kakkan, Satyamurthi and others, who were by themselves icons of culture, honesty and uncompromising patriotism. Today, the same Congress is contesting the elections as an ally of the DMK and has even become its strong ideological partner.

It is for the people of India to see how even a self-made woman and a role model for generations of aspirational women, like Kiran Bedi, is not spared by DMK–Congress from their oratorical abuse. No wonder there is today in Tamil Nadu a very popular meme that says ‘only fathers with daughters know why DMK should never be voted to power.’ Now we can extend that saying to UPA.