Thanthai Periyar Dravidar Kazhagam
The month of October means the festival of Ramleela for people who live in the North of India, beyond the Ghats of the Vindhya Range. Of course, it is fully of joy, merry and mirth, pomp and pageantry for the people of the North. But what about the people who live in south? For them it is about shame, humiliation and ridicule.
New Delhi and many other cities in Northern India are going to witness one more annual repetition of the festival of ashes i.e. Ramleela. So we had sent a leader to the Prime Minister, President and Home Minister last week with a letter demanding the following:
The Government of India must put an end to the practice of celebrating the festival of Ramleela, with the participation of V.I.P.s like the President, and the Prime Minister etc.
The Govt. of India’s policy is secularism. As the head of the Government which professes secularism, your participation in such functions ridicules such basic principles. With all humility yet with all firmness and determination, we would like to point out that if you fail to concede to our reasonable demands, we will be forced to take steps to safeguard our honor and self-respect.
And also in that letter we had clearly mentioned that we are not claiming that this ritual is to insult the Dravidian people from just the view of Dravidian movements. Of course there are many strong sentences given by people like Jawaharlal Nehru, Swami Vivekananda and many others. Here, Jawaharlal Nehru’s words on the well-known story by Aryans i.e. Ramayana
“In the Ramayana we are told that Rama was helped by the monkeys in South India and Hanuman was the great hero of the monkeys.” It may be that the story of the Ramayana is really a story of the fights of the Aryans against the people of the South whose leader was Ravana. Probably the “Monkeys” were the dark people living in Southern India. SOURCE?? Exact quote?
But there is no response to our letter, of course there is no respect for our words and for us either. Instead of banning the event, our honorable Prime Minister Mr.Modi participated in “Ram Leela” yesterday (11/10/2016) in Uttar Pradesh as a chief guest and gave a bull shit lecture that “it’s a day of good defeating evil”. Do the people of south lookevil to you, Mr.Modi?
It is clearly proven once again that the rulers of India will never care or respect the feelings of the Southerners. If they had cared, then they would not have ventured to burn the effigies of the three important heroes of the Dravidian race in the guise of honoring a hero of a religious epic. To burnRavana and to set fire to his brother Kumbakarna and son Meganatha may be a joke to Mr.Modi and his colleague Rajnath Singh, but as the Prime Minister of this country it is his duty to look into the echoes and the repercussions that are being experienced by the people of the South which alone can provide a deserving meaning to the much talked about term “national integration”.
So by condemning Ramayana’s racist portrayal of Dravidian as demons and also condemning the celebration of racist Ramleela and to fight against this brahminical hegemony, we were forced to make arrangements for a parallel celebration here to counter your festivities there. This is a rational demand based on ethnological grounds and historical authorities clubbed with social and cultural background.
Since it was a challenge to preserve our self-respect, so we ‘ThanthaiPeriyarDravidarKazhagam’ were compelled to organize RAVANLEELA festivals in the heart of Chennai, the capital of TamilNadu, by burning the effigies of Rama and Sita with equal pomp, pageantry and patronage by the Dravidians i.e. Tamil masses.
If the Indian government is not ready to ban the racist Ramleela next year also we will do the Ravanleela not only in state capital, we will perform it across each district where we will burn the effigies of Ram, Laxman and Sita.
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