After winding up the morning schedule on the first day of his party’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made a stop at a school in Suchindram, which Mahatma Gandhi had visited in 1937.
Kannan, the headmaster of S.M.S.M. Higher Secondary School, showed the Congress leader the visitors’ book which Gandhi had signed.
Suchindram is known for the famous Thanumalayaswamy temple, which Gandhi had visited with a team of Dalit bhajan singers. The event was recorded by freedom fighter S. Sivan Pillai in his memoir.
“While he was returning from Kanniyakumari, a huge crowd of enthusiastic Congress cadre stopped his car. He waved, sitting in the car. My father, the then correspondent of the school, garlanded him and got his signature in the visitors’ book,” Pillai said in Puyalin Naduve Oru Payanam (A journey in the midst of a cyclone).
On Thursday, Mr. Gandhi gave away prizes to the winners of a painting competition held on the theme ‘Unity in Diversity’. He also had a brief interaction with the students. The headmaster presented him a memento, and the Congress leader returned the gesture.
Meanwhile, the parents of Anitha, a meritorious student who ended her life because she could not enrol in the MBBS course due to her NEET score, despite scoring good marks in the Plus-Two examinations, met Mr. Gandhi.
(Assistance for overcoming suicidal thoughts is available on the State’s health helpline 104 and Sneha’s suicide prevention helpline 044- 24640050).
