Chief minister C Joseph Vijay termed Periyar his party’s guiding light, but said it did not share the leader’s views on atheism
When C Joseph Vijay launched TVK a couple of years ago, he named Periyar as one of party’s “ideological guiding lights”. “We took Periyar’s teachings but also made it clear we are believers in God,” he said. He changed the language through which political demands were made, says political historian Rajan Kurai Krishnan. Periyar said: ‘You are equal to everybody. This became a political value,” he says.
DMK and AIADMK have always maintained their core ideologies have been influenced by Periyar. CPI endorses Periyar’s social reform movement especially his views on inter-caste marriages. In June, after he became chief minister, Vijay made it clear in the assembly that while TVK had embraced Periyar’s social principles, it did not share his views on atheism. In March, former BJP state president Tamilisai Soundararajan justified the removal of a Periyar photo from the entrance of an NDA meeting in Madurai. But the rationalist leader’s influence was not limited to policy demands. “Periyar believed self-respect and questioning were synonymous. Respect yourself. “His legacy goes beyond Dravidian parties that emerged from his movement. Parties do not have to agree with all of Periyar’s ideas to engage with the political space he created.”
Periyar, says political historian and biographer Kannan R, remains an “enduring ideological benchmark”. Parties do it to establish that their politics belongs within the social and political history of Tamil Nadu, even when their ideological positions differ from his,” says Kannan. “He can never be a vote-catching name. He did not seek electoral office. But C N Annadurai, who spent years in his movement, took elements of that social reform politics into electoral mobilisation through DMK. Invoking Periyar does not mean accepting his entire ideology. “Much like Congress invokes Gandhi, parties in Tamil Nadu that cast aside his atheism and radical ideas invoke Periyar as a symbol to anchor their political identity and Tamils-first legitimacy. It is why Periyar became an ideological reference point even after the movement entered electoral politics.”