DMK harnessing its youth power
Chennai: Setting its eyes on the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the DMK, in a new stratagem, is harnessing its youth power by educating, rejuvenating, and reorienting its youth and students wings through rallies, conferences, and workshops with a view to turning the members of those two brigades into frontline fighters in the electoral battle.
As a part of the multifaceted programme to mobilize the younger generation of the party to reach out to their neutral peers in society and convert them into supporters of the DMK, a motorcycle rally was flagged off from Kanyakumari, close to the land’s end where the three seas meet, by State Minister for Sports Development and DMK’s youth wing secretary, Udhayanidhi Stalin, on Wednesday.
Clad in black and red T-shirts, 188 riders embarked on the campaign rally across the State in their motorcycles fitted with DMK flags. They would crisscross the State as four groups touching all the 234 Assembly constituencies and covering a total of over 8,500 km together and meet and influence the people, particularly the youth.
The bikers’ teams are expected to converge at Salem, where the youth wing is holding its second conference on December 17 with the theme ‘Retrieval of State Rights.’ En route, the bikers would be campaigning for the DMK by holding street corner meetings and highlighting issues like NEET and others that seek to take away the rights of the States under the present dispensation in New Delhi.
Ahead of the Youth Conference in Salem, the Students’ Wing of the DMK will organize a three-day ideological workshop for its district coordinators and deputy coordinators at the Orchard Valley Resort in Courtallam to orient them on the Dravidian principles, objectives, and tenets to equip them intellectually to fight the electoral battle.
Students’ wing secretary C V M P Ezhilarasan, in a statement on Wednesday, said the workshop would make the young leaders ideologically strong to sow the seeds of Dravidian principles among the younger generation. Already a similar workshop has been held at Yelagiri and the next one will be at Courtallam in Tenkasi district from November 24 to 26.
DMK’s deputy general secretary A Raja will be the chief guest at the inauguration of the workshop, in which the participants will also learn about the history of the Dravidian movement, the biographies of its leaders, the socially reformatory laws brought in by the DMK government to uphold social justice and trigger social growth.
The schemes and legislations introduced by the DMK on education, health, economic progress, and industrial development would also be dealt with, along with the impact those reformations made on Tamil society. How those reformative measures ushered in political and gender equality in the State and enabled the implementation of the Dravidian Model of governance that ensured that everyone got everything would also be discussed at the workshop.
Though the DMK might have other plans like promoting Youth Wing secretary Udhayanidhi Stalin politically through the youth conference, its attempt to harness its own youth power by making both the wings active is also to make the party relevant to the younger generation of voters, many of whom find it to be an anachronistic political force due to their lack of knowledge about the movement and its history.
When the DMK took over the reins of the State for the first time in 1967, it captured the imagination of the people as a youthful force with most of the top leaders being young then. Five decades later, it looks more like a party of veteran politicians, an image that the DMK now wants to change for obvious electoral compulsions.