A 144-year-old mansion is nestled between the old and the new on a quiet street in Erode in western Tamil Nadu. It is flanked by a dilapidated building on its left, and a modern house on its right. Tamil leader Periyar’s ancestral home, now a museum maintained by the state government, mirrors the state of his ideology – caught between the old and new generations, and struggling to survive in its original form.
Born in 1879 into a Kannada-speaking family of the Naicker caste, Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy Naicker or Periyar (Tamil for elder one or respected one) lived in this house through his lifetime. His parents were rich landlords who owned hundreds of acres of fertile agricultural land in Erode.
A pilgrimage to the holy town of Kashi in the early 1900s turned him against Brahmin hegemony for life. In Kashi, he faced discrimination against non-Brahmins for the first time ever when he was thrown out of a restaurant and refused food. Forced by a well-entrenched caste system to eat leftovers out of a dustbin, this rich, educated, and now embittered, landlord vowed to fight against the caste system.
He launched the Self-Respect Movement in the 1920s. His fight would upend a state and serve as the launchpad for powerful regional political parties. It would introduce the concepts of eradication of caste, rationalism and atheism to Tamil Nadu and change the state’s politics forever.
“Periyar could speak for two to three hours without a break,” said D Shanmugam, the organising secretary of Erode’s Dravidar Kazhagam, an apolitical organisation founded by Periyar to propagate the Self-Respect ideology. “I heard him speak as a young boy. He used to be mesmerising. He would use crass language quite often but it never sounded offensive, at least to me.”
Periyar and his first wife Nagammai had a girl child who died at five months of age. After Nagammai’s death, Periyar remarried. He and his second wife were childless. Periyar, however, had an older brother and two sisters. His brother Krishnasamy fathered two sons, one of whom was former Member of Parliament EVK Sampath. To Sampath and his wife Sulochana was born EVKS Elangovan.
A closet Periyarist?
“Elangovan is personally a follower of Periyar,” said SRS Kalyanasundaram, his cousin who lives in Erode. “When his mother died, Elangovan did not conduct any formalities or rituals. He simply got the body cremated without a fuss.”
Elangovan’s wedding too saw the influence of his granduncle. “It was 1975 and [the] Emergency was in force,” recounted Kalyanasundaram. “At Periyar Thidal in Chennai, 300 people came together for the Self-Respect wedding. They were served tea and biscuits and that was it.”
Despite his austere ways, however, “no one knows Elangovan is a Periyarist,” his cousin said. That's because Elangovan turned to the Congress party when he joined politics. He is currently the president of the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee.
His father, Sampath, was once touted to be Periyar’s political heir. In 1949, he left the apolitical Dravidar Kazhagam to form the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, along with CN Annadurai and others.
Periyar – who was once part of the Brahimin-dominated Congress party but quit due to discrimination in 1925 – had waged a movement against what he called the imposition of Brahminical Hindi on the Tamils of the then Madras Presidency by Congress Chief Minister C Rajagopalachari. This was in the late 1930s. Across the state, an anti-Congress wave began, the start of the anti-Hindi movement. A number of Congressmen from Tamil Nadu also mutinied and some left the party to join Periyar’s Dravidar Kazhagam.
From Dravidar Kazhagam was born the political wing of the movement, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which EVKS Sampath too joined. Subsequently, Sampath went over to the Congress party, anathema to his uncle Periyar. EVKS Elangovan followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the Congress and becoming a staunch Nehru family loyalist.
Straying from family lineage
Elangovan’s critics feel he has had it easy. Born into a wealthy family, the silver spoon he was born with extended to his political career. NV Kumaragurubaran, Erode district secretary of the Thanthai Periyar Dravidar Kazhagam, an offshoot of the original Dravidar Kazhagam, criticised Elangovan bitterly for straying far from Periyar’s ideology.
“During his stint as Union Textiles Minister between 2004 and 2009, we had put up a plaque of LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] chief Prabhakaran under Periyar’s statue in Erode,” recalled Kumaragurubaran. A core uniting theme of the Dravidian movement was language – Tamil pattru or love for Tamil was a slogan that extended to the Tamil-speaking Sri Lankans in the northern parts of the island nation, considered an extension of the Tamil motherland. The LTTE, which was formed to protect the rights of the Sri Lankan Tamils, was seen as a revolutionary force and supported by the Dravidian ideologues.
Elangovan, however, did not support the sentiment. “Elango got the plaque removed,” said Kumaragurubaran. “This is just one example of how he put [the Congress] party over his own family lineage.”
Elangovan has also been severely criticised for making derogatory comments about Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, as well as about Tamilisai Soundarrajan, the Tamil Nadu state president of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Many within the Congress party agree that Elangovan would do well to temper the vitriol in his speeches.
“Periyar never uttered a derogatory word against women, not even Brahmin women,” said Kumaragurubaran. “One cannot speak about women in this manner. He is not a nagariga pecchalar (decent speaker).”
From ideology to electoral politics
Elangovan’s granduncle may have spoken of eradication of caste in its entirety but the pressures of electoral politics have meant that this legacy is left behind in the race for votes.
Nineteen per cent of Erode district’s 11.3 lakh population comprises Scheduled Castes. The dominant community in the entire Western belt of Tamil Nadu, including Erode, Coimbatore, Tirupur and Pollachi, is the Gounder community –that was classified as a forward caste during Independence, but reclassified in 1975 as a backward class. Smaller castes like Naickers and Mudaliars form the rest of the population.
Barely 20 km from Erode lies the temple town of Tiruchengode. In June 2015, the murder of a young Dalit engineering student V Gokulraj shook the state. He was allegedly killed for speaking with a classmate, a girl from the dominant “upper caste” Gounder community. Yuvaraj, his alleged murderer, a small-time thug from the Gounder community in nearby Sankagiri town, taunted the Tamil Nadu police for months before finally surrendering in October 2015. Gokulraj’s murder is an example of the caste divides and violence running deep in the western belt of the state, across Periyar pirandha mann (the land in which Periyar was born).
Periyarists like P Kalimuthu, a professor at the Advanced Research Centre for Periyar Thought at Thanjavur’s Periyar Maniammai University, admit that caste rifts have deepened and widened, especially in the state’s western region. “Jaathi oori pocchu (Caste has seeped into society),” he said. “After the 1980s there began a trend of naming educational institutions and businesses after caste names. Before that though, it was due to Periyar that caste names ceased to be surnames, especially in rural areas.”
Parties in the electoral race take advantage of such divides in order to woo the majority community in the area to win votes. The Congress party is no exception to such politicking. In the 2011 Assembly elections, the DMK-Congress combine fielded a host of Gounder candidates in the area. The Erode East constituency was fought by Tilak of the DMK, while Erode West seat was fought by M Yuvaraj of the Congress, both Gounders. In Gobichettipalayam, the victor was KA Sengottaiyan, a prominent Gounder leader of the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
“Neither EVKS Elangovan nor his father followed Periyar in any way,” said Kumaragurubaran of the Thanthai Periyar Dravidar Kazhagam in Erode. “It is a curse that is being followed by all parties, not just the Congress. Elangovan is at the forefront of doing such disservice to Tamils. Now due to his mistakes, people are criticising Periyar.”
Elangovan faces a tough challenge ahead as the state enters into what is predicted to be a neck-and-neck contest between its two major Dravidian parties. In November 2014, the Congress suffered a major setback with the exit of former Union Minister GK Vasan, who having reportedly fallen out of favour with the Gandhis, decided to strike out on his own and re-launch his father GK Moopanar’s Tamil Maanila Congress. Half of the party cadre went with him.
Sensing Vasan’s exit, the Congress quickly put Elangovan in charge in November 2014, to stem the tide of turncoats leaving the party. The leadership felt that Elangovan would be the most acceptable candidate for the post of state party president who could bring together the warring factions of P Chidambaram, Vasan and KV Thangabalu, another local leader.
Since then, Elangovan has been working to bring in fresh young blood to replace those who went with Vasan. But the cadre strength of the party has been compromised. The party, which had an average vote share of around 9% in most Assembly elections in the state, saw its fortunes dwindle to 4.3% in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, which it contested alone. In the 2011 Assembly polls, the Congress won just five seats in alliance with the DMK, a sharp drop from 34 seats in 2006. The 2014 Lok Sabha polls were a complete washout, with the Congress returning empty-handed, a far cry from the eight seats it won in 2009.
Not a grassroots leader
Back in Erode, 64-year-old vegetable vendor C Sivasubramanian, who has witnessed Elangovan’s campaigns in the past, explains what he thinks about the politician. “Periya idathhu pillai,” he said, meaning Elangovan is someone born into a rich and important family. “He speaks well, it is entertaining to listen to him. But that is all there is to it. He is not one among us.”
When questioned about how the leader managed to win a Parliament seat from nearby Gobichettipalayam in 2004, Sivasubramanian argued that it was because of a pro-Congress mood in the state at the time. “His father was an important man in Delhi,” he said. “Maybe people thought he would do a good job like his father. Whoever thought that then [in 2004] would probably not think so now.”
Elangovan’s loyalty to the Gandhis may have given him an important post but he will now have to prove his mettle at the hustings. Meanwhile, a desperate Congress, led by a leader who has never had to plan a state election strategy, has joined hands with the DMK again. This time, it is likely to lean more on the strength of its partner.
