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Shanmugam hints at political party if forum is banned

Our Correspondent in Vellore

Mudaliar Forum president and former member of Parliament A C Shanmugam has stated that he will float a political party and contest elections if his forum is banned.

Shanmugam's statement in the Mudaliar-strong Arakkonam town in Vellore district came after Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi hinted at a ban on caste organisations indulging in violence.

The chief minister, at a press meet in Madras last week, while clarifying that the state government could not initiate action against caste forums, as it would impinge on fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution, had said a ban would be considered if the organisations indulged in violence.

Some police officials and bureaucrats have been pressing the government for sanction to prosecute leaders of such forums under Section 153-A of the Indian Penal Code, under which Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray was sought to be arraigned, but was discharged for technical reasons.

Shanmugam has not left anyone in doubt about his forum's intentions. Reiterating his announcement of floating a Mudaliar party at Arakkonam, he set a September 15 deadline for it.

He also announced the launch of the forum's trade union wing, named after the late Thiru Vi Kalyana Sundara Mudaliar, a rationalist leader of the early Congress and Dravidian movements in Tamil Nadu.

Tamil scholar Thiru Vi Ka is considered the Father of the Indian trade union movement, with him founding the first trade union in Buckingham and Carnatic Mills, Madras, now the defunct Binny Mills.

"We are launching a political party before the assembly elections next year and the community should be united," Shanmugam said. He clarified that the forum was not against any political party, though it would go along the path shown by the late C N Annadurai, founder of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. He would not elaborate if the forum stood by the DMK, or the rival AIADMK, both mainline political parties in the state, though all publicity material has the latter's flag.

While Shanmugam's attempts may be to revive the glory of the Mudaliar community, with his declaration that the community had produced four chief ministers in 17 years, the erstwhile ruling class is making similar attempts, elsewhere too. Whether it is the backward class Thevars in southern districts, the newly founded Yadava Forum in northern pockets of the south, or Nadars, deep down south, not to mention Vanniars in the north-central, and Kongu Vellalars in the west, the recent political fight has been for socio-electoral supremacy over Dalits.

For the first time, a forward caste community has joined the fray, possibly targeting backward class Vanniars and Dalits at the same time, though hopes are that the two extremes may balance off broad intermediaries. If it succeeds, it could be a return to the "old days, when the Congress had upper castes and the downtrodden on its side, with intermediary castes getting alienated from it, for no particular political reason".

The origins of the current caste wars in the state, with the local Dalits pitted against the Vanniars in the north, and Thevars in the south, may have its origins in the founding of the Justice Party movement. It is another matter that the Dalits in the state come under three major sub-sects -- Adi Dravidars in the north, Devendra Kula Vellallars in the south, and Arundhathiyar in the central districts. While the Adi Dravidars have the Dalit Panthers fighting the intermediary caste Vanniars in the north, and literally too, the Devendra Kula Vellallar Federation had floated the Puthiya Thamizhagam under legislator Dr K Krishnaswamy, on the eve of the 1996 assembly elections.

The Justice Party, the fountainhead of the later-day Dravidian movement, was a non-Brahmin upper caste movement of the landed gentry spread across the Madras Presidency, including what now forms part of Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The status-conscious communities regretted social discrimination by Brahmins, which was also perpetuated by the British India Government, through indiscriminate recruitment of the caste's clannish members into the upper echelons of bureaucracy.

Incidentally, the Justice Party leaders were not anti-god or anti-north, and in a way, not even anti-Brahmin, as the later day Self-Respect Movement of the late Periyar E V Ramaswami Naicker became. With the Congress as a political movement finding its roots in the region, the Justice Party won the 1919 elections to the Presidency Council, with no great opposition to take on. Caste-based reservation was its one-point agenda, which was achieved through the First Communal government order of 1921, and modified through the Second Communal government order of 1925.

With its agenda served, and with Mahatma Gandhi taking the Congress to the masses, the Justice Party was rendered irrelevant, until a former Congressman in Periyar revived it. Incidentally, even the term 'Periyar', meaning elder or grand seer, could be considered an adaptation of the title Mahatma, conferred on Gandhi by Rabindranath Tagore. As the upper crust of society soon found it fashionable to be associated with the Congress, Periyar's movement naturally attracted intermediary castes, in the second rung of the social ladder.

It's this second rung that's seeking to assert itself across the state now, after the DMK and the AIADMK, electoral offshoots of the Periyar movement and his Dravidar Kazhagam, outlived their societal utility. The new generation of voters is born into a society where job reservations exist, and most rationalist social reforms for which Periyar fought and the DK and the DMK stood for, have been extinguished.

If today the DMK and AIADMK continue to be successful, it is mostly because of the absence of a powerful alternative, and equally because of their willingness to adapt to changing circumstances. Periodic splits in the parent DMK and the timely shift in district-level leadership to the newer generation alone may have contributed to their continued relevance, as much as their willingness to adapt to the 21st century, in which information technology, and not anti-Brahminism matters.

However, with Constitution-guaranteed reservations raising the socio-economic consciousness of Dalits, intermediary castes find themselves pushed to the wall. Or so they perceive it. The likes of the Kodiyamkulam incident were waiting to happen in 1993, driving a deep divide between the Dalits and Thevars in the southern districts, which the Devendra Kula Vellallar Federation exploited, socially, and then electorally. Its success has inspired the Dalit Panthers to go the whole hog in northern districts.

That the intermediary castes, more than upper castes, resent reservations should be borne out by the fact that the First Amendment to the Constitution was enacted only under political pressure from Periyars, on the then Congress chief minister, the late K Kamaraj. The latter had then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru amend the Constitution, to give state governments freedom to reserve jobs for backward classes, apart from statute-guaranteed quotas for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.

With the Mudaliar Forum joining the milieu, the fight is becoming three-dimensional again, an example which may be repeated by the Saiva Vellala upper caste community in southern districts before long. Then it will be two against one electorally, only that even now, it has worked more or less the same way, with the Dalits getting cornered. That may not be the case anymore, and it could even be a return to the "good old days of the Congress," where intermediary castes were affected electorally, until the DMK could inspire them into a more relevant political agenda, as applicable to the Tamil Nadu of 1967 and after.

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