Men of character

Sir, - The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, Mr. M. Karunanidhi's declaration on September 24 in Chennai (The Hindu, Sept. 25) that if `atrocities' of the upper castes had been put an end to in (erstwhile) Thanjavur district, ``it owed to the seeds sown by Periyar's movement'' is indeed a very tall claim, to put it mildly.

Ever since he became Chief Minister for the second time in 1971, in alliance with the then Congress of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Mr. Karunanidhi and his Government in Tamil Nadu have spared no efforts to `deify' Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy as the ``one and only'' leader of Tamil Nadu who fought for social justice in this part of the country. They are even holding him up as an example to be emulated and respected by the rest of India also in preference to their own leaders of eminence!

However, students of contemporary history cannot miss the fact that it was Mahatma Gandhi's `constructive programme' of Prohibition (of intoxicating drinks), promotion of khadi and other village industries, and eradication of the evil of untouchability that inspired countless men and women of Tamil Nadu from rich and upper caste families to work shoulder to shoulder with their socially downtrodden brethren to improve their lot in every respect - but they all did it without the poison of caste hatred that was injected, day in and day out, by Periyar EVR and his coterie in Tamil Nadu.

Late C.N. Annadurai was one of those honourable gentlemen of our politics who openly acknowledged what the people of Tamil Nadu owed to C. Rajagopalachari and Mahatma Gandhi in these respects, in quite a few of the public meetings he had addressed from 1963 to 1968.

A word, also, about Mr. Karunanidhi's `dig' at the communists on their `social justice' plank. When one goes through the biographies of communist leaders and workers, one point that emerges is that 99 per cent (even more) of them were and are men of character, integrity, and moral and physical courage. Quite a few of them married even in those distant days outside their castes but many of them stayed bachelors, wedded only to their ideology and party.

I have come across `card' holders of the then Communist Party eking out humble livelihood as `insurance' agents and what not, giving all the rest of their time to obey the commands of their party whatever it be - none of them either amassed wealth or allowed any of their progeny to exploit their `connections' to further their own ends.

Jawaharlal Nehru's state-oriented socialist policies have miserably failed to deliver the goods in India - it is because Marxists and Nehruvites missed something very vital about the human element of social engineering and common psychology - a point so well and so elaborately discussed by Prof. Laski in Grammar of Politics but so sadly missed by those entrusted with `planning' with all the grandeur and paraphernalia of the august state under socialist governments.

Their failure has a parallel, at least in our country - it is akin to the eloquent failure of our erudite Vedantic scholars whose knowledge can never be questioned but whose `realisation' of the Atma (soul) is ever open to doubt!

K. Vedamurthy,

Chennai

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