DMK seeks to appropriate the anti-NEET slogan

Chennai: Seeking to appropriate the anti-NEET plank to itself, the DMK upped its ante on the protest against the common national level medical entrance examination by calling for a State-wide hunger strike by its student, youth and medical wings at all district headquarters on August 20, Sunday, the same day on which the AIADMK had organized its ambitious state-level conference in Madurai.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, DMK youth wing secretary Udhayanidhi Stalin, medical wing president Kanimozhi N V N Somu and secretary Ezhil Naganathan and student wing president Rajiv Gandhi and secretary C V M P Ezhilarasan, said the agitation was against the Union Government that was insensitive to the plight of students and parents in the State and against the Governor R N Ravi.

Claiming to be the only party that had been consistently opposing the implementation of NEET since the beginning, the statement gave details of the various efforts made by the present DMK government to get exemption for the State and also said that the party’s student and youth wings had already organized several protests.

It said Chief Minister M K Stalin had written to his counterparts in 12 different States to seek the shifting of education to the State list in the Constitution from the present concurrent list and also the scrapping of NEET as among the slew of steps taken to put an end to the entrance examination that had earned the antipathy of the people.

The DMK government that passed the Bill in the Assembly seeking exemption for the State after forming an expert committee to study the issue, followed it up with the Governor repeatedly when he had put it on cold storage. It passed it again when the Governor returned it and once again put pressure on him to send it to the President for approval.

Describing the Governor as a stumbling block to every effort made by the State government to scrap NEET for the State, the leaders alleged that he and the ‘Aryan Model’ persons who had despatched him to Chennai remained inured to the continuing incidents of suicide, starting from S Anita of Ariyalur district to Jagadeeswaran of Chrompet in Chennai and his father Selvasekar.

Squarely blaming the Union Government, the 'servile' AIADMK and the insensitive Governor for NEET continuing in the State, the statement pointed out that what could not be brought in when M Karunanidhi andr J Jayalalithaa were holding the Chief Minister’s post made an easy entry during Edappadi K Palaniswami's tenure.

Referring to the incident inside Raj Bhavan where Ammachiappan Ramasamy from Salem was asked to sit down by the Governor for questioning him on NEET, the statement said the episode provided evidence that NEET was opposed by even parents who have spent lakhs of rupees on sending their children to private coaching centres and seeing them emerge victorious.

The Sunday protest is likely to be DMK's first step towards turning NEET into a vote garnering issue in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections as the AIADMK has been demonized on the matter though the party is also opposed to NEET and the government headed by Palaniswami had passed a Bill against it in the Assembly in 2017.

Insinuating the AIADMK of not being serious about the abolition of NEET. the DMK, in its statement, pointed out that the AIADMK government had not informed  the Assembly for 21 months when the Union Government had returned the Bill and that it came to light only after the Union Home Ministry informed the court about it.