Chennai: Launching a scathing attack on the Union Government for neglecting Tamil and other regional languages but promoting Hindi by celebrating ‘Hindi Week’ and ‘Hindi Month,’ the DMK accused the BJP government of cutting down on the allocation of funds for disaster management to States ruled by other parties and reducing the financial support for the NREGA scheme that guaranteed work for at least 100 days in a year for the poor.
Among the six resolutions passed at the DMK’s High-Level Action Committee meeting on Wednesday, one gave a clarion call to the party cadre and functionaries to enthusiastically gear up for the 2026 Assembly elections immediately and warning them against being lackadaisical on it thinking that the polls were more than a year away.
Taking on the Union Government on a plethora of issues like its failure to conduct the caste census, interfering in the rights of the minorities by amending the Wakf Board acts and not making efforts to stop rail mishaps that were claiming several lives on the regular basis, it charged the BJP government with withholding funds for the States under the Samagra Shiksha schemes, putting students and teachers in hardship.
The DMK flayed the government for the introduction of the three new Criminal laws, appropriating the powers of the States guaranteed under the Constitution, impeding social justice by not implementing the reservation recommended by the Mandal Commission in full and for its anti-democratic, anti-people and anti-national activities.
Accusing the BJP government of only taking up its communal agenda, the DMK said that the Union Government had not made any effort to honour the promises it gave to the people before the 2014 elections and was not putting away the ideas that would crush the pluralistic nature of society and think about working for the welfare of the majority of people.
Now that Sri Lanka had seen a change of guard, the government should find a solution to the continuing problem faced by fishermen from Tamil Nadu while putting out to sea in the Palk Straits and ensure that the attacks on them were brought to an end, a resolution said.
The immediate need for putting out the raging fire in Manipur was another resolution, which urged the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take extra efforts in resolving the problem in the north-eastern state that had been seeing the people robbed off their human rights and the crushing of humanism itself for the past 18 months.
The Union government was seemingly not bothered about resolving the conflagration and the indifference of two governments should not cost more human rights with the prevailing lawlessness being allowed to continue unabated, the resolution said.
Another resolution wanted the upholding of the fiscal rights of the State by acceding to all the demands placed before the 16th Financial Commission through the master class presentation made recently when the members were in Chennai.
The high-level committee expressed its gratitude to Chief Minister M K Stalin for ensuring the development of the State through several schemes and uplifting it from the abyss the previous AIADMK government had pushed it into.
