'Neither me, nor Chidambaram can get...': Mani Shankar Aiyar says Dravidian forces sought a separate nation

Mani Shankar Aiyar

With less than a year before Tamil Nadu goes to the polls, senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar on Sunday made a bold statement saying Dravidian politics envisaged a separate country which enables them to practice their brand of politics. Aiyar went on to add that neither he nor P Chidambaram can be elected from Tamil Nadu without the help of Dravidian forces.

Speaking at an event, the veteran Congress leader said Tamil Nadu is a completely different state. He stated that 'these Dravidian forces' demanded before the partition that India should be divided into Hindustan, Pakistan and Dravidistan.

For years, the official language issue has been central to the political mobilisation of the Dravidian Movement and when the Official Language Bill, 1963, was introduced in Parliament, DMK founder C.N. Annadurai, fondly called Anna by his followers, was in the Rajya Sabha. He reminded the Congress government that democracy did not mean majority rule.

"When Annadurai elected to the Rajya Sabha, he came in as a separatist, and he argued in the Upper House against Atal Bihari Vajpayee that if you impose Hindi on me, i am leaving this country. Even today, none of you understand Tamil Nadu. It is not a state like any other state in the country, which is why neither Mr. Chidambaram nor can get elected without the help of the Dravidian forces," quipped Aiyar.

Speaking at a separate session, Aiyar blamed failures within the Indian establishment for the collapse of Rajiv Gandhi’s Sri Lanka policy, remarking the intelligence and army “let him down” even as Gandhi persisted with what he believed was a necessary mission to preserve the island’s and India’s integrity.

In a session titled “Reassessing Rajiv Gandhi’s legacy for India’s future” at the Khushwant Singh Litfest, Aiyar defended the 1987 accord and the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) as an effort to prevent the disintegration of Sri Lanka and avert a spillover that might inflame separatist sentiment in Tamil Nadu.

“Rajiv knew that disintegration in Sri Lanka might cause disintegration in India,” Aiyar said, adding that the accord had the army’s agreement and envisaged peacekeepers acting at Colombo’s request to stabilise the country, not to conquer it. However, that operation went badly wrong, he said, flagging the alleged shortcomings in planning and execution and accused parts of the Indian establishment of misreading the ground.