The distasteful tweet — now deleted — on Periyar by the Tamil Nadu BJP on his 46th death anniversary has triggered a firestorm of protests in the state.
About:
Born in 1879, E V Ramasamy ‘Periyar’ is remembered for the Self Respect Movement to redeem the identity and self-respect of Tamils.
Periyar started his political career as a Congress worker. He quarrelled with Gandhi over the question of separate dining for Brahmin and non-Brahmin students.
He resigned from the party in 1925, and associated himself with the Justice Party and the Self Respect Movement, which opposed the dominance of Brahmins in social life, especially the bureaucracy.
Periyar’s fame spread beyond the Tamil region during the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924, a mass movement to demand that lower caste persons be given the right to use a public path in front of the famous Vaikom temple. He would later be referred to as Vaikom Veerar (Hero of Vaikom).
In the 1940s, Periyar launched a political party, Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), which espoused an independent Dravida Nadu comprising Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada speakers.
As a social reformer, he focused on social, cultural and gender inequalities, and his reform agenda questioned matters of faith, gender and tradition.
Periyar died in 1973 at the age of 94. Over the years, Periyar is revered as Thanthai Periyar, the father figure of modern Tamil Nadu.
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