Since he became Chief Minister for the first time, climbing out of the large shadow of his father M Karunanidhi, M K Stalin has courted a distinct image of himself as an upholder of “Dravidian interests”. This serves him well at a time when the other powerful regional party, the AIADMK, is seen now to completely bear the stamp of the BJP – a party that is seen as “alien” to the Tamil way of things.
Hence the ‘Dravidian model’, including of development, that has emerged as the Stalin government’s buzzword.
Soon after he took charge as CM in May 2021, Stalin had added the words ‘Belongs to Dravidian Stock’ to his Twitter profile. This harked back to a speech made by the legendary C N Annadurai in Parliament 59 years ago, declaring the same.
On completion of a year in government, Stalin first floated the claim to a ‘Dravidian model’ of governance, taking out newspaper advertisements, including in the national capital, talking about the same.
On May 15 last year, the DMK held a workshop for party workers titled ‘Dravidian Model is the National Model’ in Coimbatore, where former Union minister A Raja directly pitted this model against the BJP’s. The latter’s governance, he said, was an example of the ‘Aryan model’: “regressive and divisive”.
Even two archaeological digs in Tamil Nadu suggesting human settlements dating back as far as the Indus Valley Civilization or older, find the state and Centre arranged along the touchy Dravidian vs Aryan debate, which has got a new edge under the BJP regime at the Centre.
In a reference to the carbon-dating of cultural deposits found at the Mayiladumparai excavation site in Krishnagiri district, Stalin has said that the history of India be rewritten with the “Tamil land” as the starting point. The carbon-dating of deposits at the site put the use of iron in India to 4,200 years ago, the DMK government said. Before this, the earliest evidence of iron use was 1900-2000 BCE for the country, and 1500 BCE for Tamil Nadu. The latest evidence dates the findings from Tamil Nadu to 2172 BCE.
The DMK government has opened its purse strings to the state Archaeology Department to explore the digs at both Mayiladumparai and Keeladi. A landmark finding in 2019 at sites in the state, including Keeladi near Madurai, had put the origins of the Tamil Brahmi scripts as 600 BCE, compared to around 300 BCE as believed earlier. This dating had narrowed the gap between the Indus Valley Civilization and Tamilagam/South India’s Sangam Age.
The dating of the scripts had become controversial when the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) did not go for advanced carbon-dating tests, and an ASI researcher who had initiated the study was transferred out of the state. The 2019 findings came out of the state government’s efforts.
During his speech at the ‘Dravidian Model’ workshop, Raja also said that the dreams of B R Ambedkar had been defeated by the ‘Aryan model’, but Tamil Nadu’s ‘Dravidian model’ had kept them alive.
A reference to Ambedkar, incidentally, was also said to have been omitted by Governor Ravi in his speech Monday.