Tamil Nadu governor R.N. Ravi on Thursday accused Chief Minister M.K. Stalin of “stubbornly refusing” to observe the death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi at the Gandhi Madapam in Chennai as suggested by him. He accused the DMK dispensation of disrespecting Mahatma Gandhi by observing his death anniversary “in a corner of the city museum.”
“Gandhi Mandapam is a grand memorial of the Father of the Nation built over a sprawling land adjacent to the Guindy National Park, Chennai by K. Kamaraj in 1956. Does it make any sense to do Gandhi's memorial events - his birthday and martyrdom day in a corner of a city museum?,” Ravi asked in a post on X.
In the politically charged post, he alleged that the “followers of Dravidian ideology mocked the father of the nation.”
The Martyrs Day on the death anniversary of Gandhi on January 30 is usually observed by both the governor and the chief minister at the Gandhi statue on the beach road near the marina beach. However, due to metro rail work being carried out on the beach road, the Gandhi statue at Marina was relocated to the government museum at Egmore in August 2022. It is a bronze statue which was unveiled by then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959.
In response to the governor’s tweet, Tamil Nadu’s information department minister M.P. Swaminathan said that a close look at the photographs of the event will show the respect paid by the chief minister to Mahatma Gandhi and that it was not at a corner of the museum as said by the governor.
“We are patriots and we love Gandhi. We don't celebrate his assassins. The governor knows who killed Gandhi and why he was killed. Is it not a fact that Gandhi was killed by the Hindutva terrorists?” Swaminathan asked.
Governor Ravi’s attack on the government and the ideologies of the DMK comes a day after the ruling party passed a resolution in its MPs' meeting on Wednesday. The DMK MPs will raise in Parliament the issue of evolving a code of conduct for governors. They will also insist on the setting of a time frame for them to grant assent to the bills passed in the state assemblies.
