BJP leader and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday, March 15, 2024, charged that the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, comprising parties such as the DMK and Congress, could never succeed in developing Tamil Nadu. “Their history is of scams, and their policies are focussed on coming to power to loot the public,” he claimed at a BJP public meeting in Kanniyakumari district.
Mr. Modi said he was seeing a huge transformation coming up in the State. “I am confident this time that the performance of the BJP in Tamil Nadu will break apart the arrogance of the DMK and Congress’s I.N.D.I.A. bloc,” he said.
Akin to the BJP’s ‘Ekta,’ (unity) yatra which started in 1991 from Kanniyakumari to Kashmir, this time for the ‘Viskshit Sankalp Yatra,’ the route is from Kashmir to Kanniyakumari. “Just as the people of Jammu and Kashmir rejected the party who dreamt of breaking the nation apart, the people of Tamil Nadu will also do the same,” he contended.
Listing various infrastructure schemes undertaken by the Centre such as the Kanniyakumari to Tiruvananthapuram four-way road; Marthandam to Parvathipuram flyover and the Narikulam bridge, he said, the previous governments, citing various reasons such as insufficient funds, kept these projects on hold for years together. On one hand there were the “BJP’s welfare schemes”, and on the other hand were the “DMK government’s scams and more scams,” he alleged.
Taking pride of the consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya, Mr. Modi, said he had visited several important temples in Tamil Nadu before the consecration. However, the DMK government had attempted to stop people from viewing the ceremony itself, for which they were even rapped by the Supreme Court, he said. In his view, he said, this made it clear that the DMK government was not just the enemy of the State’s future but also of the State’s past and heritage. “As a whole, the DMK government does not have respect for our culture, tradition and our history,” he claimed, adding, “The DMK even boycotted the ‘Sengol’ which was placed in the new Parliament building.”
Even in the case of the jallikattu issue, it was NDA government that was enthusiastic about bringing the sport back alive, he contended. “As long as I am here, I will protect the culture of Tamil Nadu,” Mr Modi claimed.
The PM also accused the I.N.D.I.A. bloc constituents of playing with people’s lives. “But unlike them, I was not sleeping, when T.N. fishermen were arrested by Sri Lanka and were given prison sentences,” he added. Recalling the various diplomatic steps he had taken to ensure the fishermen’s release, he said, he went all out to protect the fishermen and bring them back alive. “My fishermen will not tolerate this anymore as the mistake has not been on their part: the sins have been jointly committed by the DMK and Congress,” Mr. Modi charged.
Slamming the DMK and the Congress for their “ill treatment of women”, he recalled the pandemonium in the Assembly in 1989 at which time former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had alleged that she was attacked by DMK MLAs. The BJP, he said, always stood for the welfare of women. The DMK government only knew how to play politics in the name of women. “This is evident in the increase in crime rates against women in the State,” he contended.
“I am deeply saddened to not have had an opportunity to learn the Tamil language. But, as a solution to this, I will be speaking to the Tamil people in Tamil through the ‘Namo in Tamil’ handle on social media platform X, with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI),” he added. Mr. Modi appealed to the people to listen to his speech and share it on their social media handles to enable his views reach more people.
BJP state president K. Annamalai, Union Minister of State L. Murugan, and other BJP party functionaries inlcuding Pon. Radhakrishnan, Nainar Nagendran, Vanathi Srinivasan, Sudhakar Reddy, Arvind Menon, M.R. Gandhi, S. Vijayadharani, actors Sarathukumar and Radhika Sarathkumar, Tamizhaga Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam’s John Pandian were among those who participated.
