Kamal Haasan has announced that he would be contesting from the Coimbatore South constituency in the upcoming Tamil Nadu state assembly polls. The contest, which Haasan will be fighting out against the BJP and Congress, will be a political debut for the actor-turned-politician. In many ways, his performance in Coimbatore South will determine whether the Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) and its founder have any future in Tamil Nadu politics at all. It is speculated that BJP will field the national president of the party’s women’s wing Vanathi Srinivasan against Haasan, according to The News Minute.
Now that it has become clear that Kamal Haasan will be contesting the Tamil Nadu elections, a serious issue must be addressed that of Haasan’s past travesties and rather outrageous comments, mostly for Hindus. It is important that in the runup to the assembly election, Tamil Hindus are given a reminder of the man and his mindless statements, shrouded almost always under the garb of ‘rationality’. The time is opportune for Hindu fans of Kamal Haasan to make an educated political choice in the runup to voting in his favour.
For instance, in 2019, Kamal Haasan claimed that the word ‘Hindu’ is not native to India and that it didn’t exist before the arrival of the Mughals. “The 12 Alwars (ancient Vaishnavite saints) or 63 Nayanmars (ancient Shaivite saints) did not make a reference about the word Hindu anywhere. We were named Hindus by Mughals or other foreign rulers who came before Mughals. The Britishers who ruled us followed and endorsed the same word,” Haasan said in a statement in Tamil. The lie was busted by TrueIndology, who revealed how Swami Vidyaranya, the founding Guru of the Vijayanagara empire in the 14th century, much before the Mughals, had used the word ‘Hindus’.
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Kamal Haasan had, in the same year, been at the centre of another controversy regarding his comments on Godse. Haasan had claimed that Nathuram Godse was independent India’s first ‘Hindu terrorist’. In February 2019, the man had gone on to ask the Indian government why it was not holding a ‘referendum’ in ‘Azad Kashmir’. “Why isn’t the Indian government holding a referendum in Kashmir? Who is it they are afraid of? If leaders of both countries behave properly, then there will be no reason for the death of our soldiers, the line of control will be under control,” Kamal Haasan said.
Of course, as a Tamil politician, who survives on the flames of Dravidianism, Kamal Haasan took to sermonising ‘those’ who were stuffing Hindi down the throats of Tamilians and essentially people of South India. “Among the family of languages, the youngest one is Hindi. It is a little child in a diaper. We will have to take care of that language because it is our child too. We will definitely take care of it. Compared to Tamil, Sanskrit and Telugu, it is still the youngest language,” Kamal Hassan said in October 2019.
It would be advisable for Hindu fans of Kamal Haasan to rethink standing in the man’s favour, given that he has a history of making outrageous remarks only to score sub-nationalist brownie points. What’s worse, the instances detailed in this report are hardly an indicator of the tremendous loathing which Haasan has for devout Hindus and Indian nationalists.
