In an interview to Tamil TV channel- Thanti TV, Chief Minister of Haryana- Manohar Lal Khattar set the internet ablaze by replying in Tamil.
The interviewer asked the questions in English but Khattar replied fluently in Tamil. Khattar has his ethnic roots in Punjab.
The video is going viral on the internet, and everyone is praising Khattar’s fluency in the Tamil language.
Khattar also recited couplet from “Thirukkural”, a classic collection of Tamil couplets. The couplet translated means: “As the letter A is the first of all letters, the eternal God is first in the world.”
On the predictive outcome of Haryana elections, He confidently said “Meendum thamarai malarum (lotus will bloom again)”. He also said that “Tamil people in Haryana are Haryanvis. They are my people.”
Haryana Chief Minister Shri @mlkhattar’s interview to Thanthi TV, in Tamil! Please watch. pic.twitter.com/sDONvF0kvL
— BJP (@BJP4India) October 17, 2019
Khattar learned Tamil 40 years ago. He pursued a certificate course in the Tamil language during his school time. He has visited Tamil Nadu several times. He enjoys eating upma and uthappam.
A decent-sized Tamil community lives in Haryana. Khattar said “Tamil people live in various parts of Haryana. Chandigarh Tamil Sangam has been doing a brilliant public service.”
The fluency of a North Indian CM in a South Indian language is earning praise from the people across India.
This would help to bridge the North-South divide and encourage the people of Tamil Nadu to learn the Hindi language.
Leaders like Khattar give a constructive message to the people across the country to embrace regional languages.
On the other hand, some South Indian leaders like Kamal Haasan and MK Stalin try to create a North-South divide to get votes.
Recently, Haasan said that, in comparison to Tamil, Sanskrit is like a baby in diapers.
Leaders from BJP including PM Modi are trying hard to bridge the North-South divide. When PM Modi visited Houston in the United States he said, “Because you’ve asked ‘Howdy Modi!’, my response is everything is fine in India,” in Eight Indian languages including Tamil.
“When I spoke in Tamil in the US and about the heritage of the Tamil language, it was received well and is now reverberating across the US”, Narendra Modi told BJP cadres at Chennai airport.
This is a great initiative by BJP leaders to bridge the regional divide. It is also a tight slap on leaders who try to bag votes by appealing regional chauvinism and create a divide.
British tried to divide North and South India by propagating that Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) which states that South Indians and North Indians are different people. The devious politicians used this to create the divide in the name of North Indian imperialism over Southerners.
The Aryan Invasion Theory asserted that Vedic culture and practices were of a foreign origin, which was supposedly enforced upon the indigenous populations of the Indian subcontinent by a fairer or light-skinned group of people that invaded the mainland and pushed the local population down south.
The theory was promoted to help the British suppress Indian nativist ideology or a sense of common identity, further assisting them in their larger ‘divide and rule’ policy.
However, in a big blow to the historians still reeling from a colonial hangover, a DNA study on skeletons found in Rakhigarhi has found no traces of the Aryan gene, wrecking the basis of the Aryan Invasion Theory.
Rakhigarhi, a village in Hisar District in the state of Haryana in India is the site of a pre-Indus Valley Civilization settlement going back to millennia.
The study — titled ‘An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers’, led by archaeologist Vasant Shinde examined remains of Indus Valley Civilisation but found no trace of R1a1, or the ‘Aryan gene’.
As AIT has been proven farce, South Indian leaders should stop embracing the divide and rule policy. They should also learn from leaders like PM Modi and Manohar Lal Khattar.