DMK only opposed to a temple on a mosque site: Udhay

Since the party was not against any religion or faith, as M Karunanidhi had averred, it was the pulling down of the mosque to give way for the temple that was not acceptable to the party, he told the media after flagging off the 310 km relay run of the torch for the Second Youth Conference of the DMK, to be held at Salem on January 21.

‘Let’s not mix religion and politics,’ Udhayaidhi Stalin said, referring to the remarks of party treasurer T R Baalu, and added that the torch that began its journey near the statue of Periyar E V Ramasamy on Anna Salai in Chennai would reach the conference venue in Salem after two days.

The torch would be handed over to the Chief Minister M K Stalin, who would be delivering the presidential address at the conference that would see the participation of three to four lakh youth, he said, adding that a petition with 85 lakh signatures, seeking the abolition of NEET (the national level medical admission entrance exam), would also be handed over to the Chief Minister.

Subsequently, he himself would take the petition against NEET to New Delhi to present it to the President of India, Udhayanidhi Stalin said. He also explained the purpose of the Salem conference as an event not just aimed at being a rendezvous of party cadre but as an event with an ideological bonding.

Calling upon the party cadre to make the conference a historic one, Stalin put out a video message and also wrote an ‘epistle to party brethren’ explaining the relevance of the Salem conference at a time when there was an urgent need to redeem India from the dark abyss into which democracy had been plunged into.

He recalled the first youth conference at Tirunelveli in 2007, which also marked the silver jubilee of his taking over the reins of the Youth Wing, and said that the 25 ‘epistles to co-borns’ penned by Karuanidhi in connection with it then had been reproduced in ‘Murasoli’ (the party newspaper) for inspiring the younger generation ideologically in the run up to the second conference.

Recalling that 'State Autonomy' was the last among the five proclamations of Karunanidhi at the 1970 DMK conference in Trichy, which elucidated that there should be an autonomous government at the State and a federal government at the Centre to upkeep pluralism, he said the theme for the Salem conference was a take off on that: 'Retrieval of State Rights.'

Laying emphasis on the need for asserting the State’s rights at a time when the educational, language, finance and legal rights to the States were being taken away by the Union Government, he said that it was functioning not just against the States but the Constitution, too.

Persons who did not qualify to hold gubernatorial positions were made Governors of States and they played cheap and abhorrent politics by whipping up communal frenzy through their politicization of religious feelings and languages like Hindi and Sanskrit were sought to be imposed on others, he said.