The past has an uncanny knack for ridiculing the present and threatening the future. The dishonest disown the past, the adept reason with it. Amidst its latest war against Hindi imposition, DMK has been summoned by history to reason with its past. And there is no escape from this duty, as the source of the challenge is its father figure, Periyar.

When DMK opened a new front in the language war last week replacing the ‘`’ symbol on the state budget logo with ‘’, the Tamil letter for ‘roo’, BJP supporters went fishing in the past. And a great catch they had with a video of Periyar calling Tamil a barbarian language. There is no denying that Periyar was – to put it mildly – harsh in his comments on Tamil (as he was with brahmins and Hindu gods), which he called “a language unfit for even begging”.

 

While a Dravidar Kazhagam functionary called it a deep fake, Kanimozhi called it a “father scolding his son”. “His words were meant to push for progress, to move away from blind adherence to ancient history without understanding the basics, and to instill scientific temper,” she told TOI. That’s a good try, but maybe Stalin should come out with a more elaborate explanation to put it in the historical context where Periyar wanted Tamils to learn English which he saw as the language of power.

No amount of justification, however, will save the party from embarrassment unless it shows the courage to disagree – not disown – respectfully with its patriarch, at least in parts. This applies to all political parties which have a history of at least a few decades (the older it gets, the heavier the baggage). The more a party tries to deny its past and the more it delays biting the bullet, the more difficult its future gets. While an organisation should remain truthful (or pretend so) to its founding principle/s (self-respect, in DMK’s case), to be successful in the long run it should not only adapt to the changing social realities but also own them up and explain to its constituency, if not the people.

No major party in India is free of its ghosts of the past. For Congress, it has been the Emergency that its celebrated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi introduced in 1975. For RSS, it came from ‘Bunch of Thoughts’ by its ‘guruji’, M S Golwalkar. The RSS’s second sarsanghchalak (chief) who led the organisation for 33 years till his death in 1973 said Muslims, Christians and communists are India’s “internal enemies”. The Sangh hasn’t changed this label for communists, but when BJP, its most successful progeny, seeks to scale more electoral peaks, it cannot preach (though it practises) against Muslims and Christians.

In the art of political exorcism, leaders of other organisations can take a leaf out of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s book. After intense discussions within the organisation, Bhagwat said this in Sept 2018: “Bunch of Thoughts is a collection of speeches which were made in a particular context. It cannot remain eternally valid. Sangh is not a dogmatic organisation. Times change and accordingly our thoughts transform. In fact, Hedgewar (RSS founder) had said that we are free to try to adapt to the times as they change.”

While DMK and BJP may painfully explain the speeches of their patriarchs, Congress may find it hard to evade the haunting of Emergency. In a conversation with Cornell University professor and former chief advisor to Manmohan Singh’s govt Kaushik Basu in 2021, Rahul Gandhi said the Emergency was “wrong”, while trying to distinguish it from the present dispensation’s “capture of democratic institutions”. Admission of guilt is good. Whataboutery isn’t.

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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