Free India’s first terrorist was a Hindu, says Kamal Haasan

Chennai: Actor-politician Kamal Haasan has stirred a controversy in declaring at an election campaign that the first terrorist in independent India was a Hindu and his name was Nathuram Godse. While the BJP leaders have slammed him for the ‘Hindu’ tag given to Mahatma’s killer, Tamil Nadu Congress president KS Alagiri declared he supported Kamal “not 100 per cent but 1000 per cent”. The Dravidar Kazhagam chief K Veeramani too found the MNM chief's Hindu terror swipe as sweet music.

Addressing a large gathering at Aravakurichi late Sunday, Kamal said he was one of those ‘proud Indians’ who desired an India practicing equality and where the ‘three colours’ in the tricolor remained intact and did not get smudged by any dominance by a single colour —- an obvious attack on saffron.

“I am not saying this because this is a Muslim dominated area, but I am saying this before a statue of Gandhi. Free India’s first extremist was a Hindu, his name is Nathuram Godse. There it (extremism, apparently) starts,” said the Makkal Neethi Maiyam chief. Claiming he was a “self-assumed great-grandson” of Gandhi, he said he had “seeking answers for that murder,” referring to Gandhi’s assassination in 1948.   Kamal Haasan is not new to the knack of triggering controversies and volatile debates, but this one is clearly the biggest of all his gaffes. While the ‘cinematic’ stuff would die down quicker than his theatre releases, his by-poll campaign rhetoric at Aravakurichi could linger on a bit longer and has definitely crossed swiftly across the Tamil borders to even distant north, where the BJP and other saffron voices have denounced him in the strongest language — the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha spokesperson in Uttar Pradesh even going to the extent of issuing a veiled death threat — not to forget TN’s most ‘exciting’ minister Rajendra Balaji declaring that Kamal’s tongue must be cut.

While BJP State president Dr Tamilisai Sounderarajan slammed Kamal for his remarks, her party filed a complaint with state Chief Electoral Officer Satyabrata Sahoo demanding stringent action against the MNM and its leader. He made his remarks at a "thickly-populated" Muslim area, so his intention was "to create religious unrest in society and create communal tension in the Constituency and all over the state", said the complaint, adding, "This is gross violation of the code of conduct prescribed  by the Election Commission".

Joining the issue, Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman chided Kamal saying he "does not understand the difference between an assassin and a terrorist". He was following the Congress and the Communists in showing Hindus "in a bad light to appease minorities", she said in reply to a question about Kamal's Godse comment.

"It proves that he does not understand the difference between an assassin and a terrorist. An assassin is very different from a terrorist. If only he goes through the entire history and also follows up on the trial of Mahatma Gandhi, he would know the difference", she told a press conference. "He is in a hurry to prove that he follows the same line of appeasing minorities for the sake of his newly launched venture", she added.

It may recalled that Kamal had played Saket Ram in his 2000 movie, Hey Ram, in which his wife Aparna is raped during the Partition and the distressed man would want to kill Gandhi because he advocated peace with Muslims. Saket goes to carry out the 'kill' but Godse would beat him to it.