Goa governor and BJP veteran P S Sreedharan Pillai on Friday ridiculed the LDF government for exalting the architect of the anti-casteist Dravidan movement, Periyar E V Ramaswamy Naicker, as one of the tallest leaders of the Vaikom Satyagraha.
Sreedharan Pillai said the prominence for the “Tamil social reformer” undermined the contributions of Kerala’s great “hindu reformers” like Sree Narayana Guru and Mannathu Padmanabhan. The Goa governor was delivering his inaugural address at the five-day Ananthapuri Hindu Mahasammelanam 2025, organised by the Hindu Dharma Parishad in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday.
“There was no one to question what Kerala did last December,” the Goa Governor said, referring to the valedictory celebrations of the Vaikom Satyagraha attended jointly by the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. “We said that all this (Vaikom struggle) was done by a man from Tamil Nadu, and both the chief ministers together unveiled his statue at Vaikom. Was there anyone in Kerala to speak out against this, to firmly tell them what they did was wrong,” he said.
On December 12, 2024, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin and his Kerala counterpart Pinarayi Vijayan came together to unveil the renovated memorial of Periyar, one of the leading lights of the Vaikom Satyagraha. Pillai refrained from mentioning Periyar’s name and talked about him in the third person.
“Now we are trying to create the impression that all the changes were brought about by a man from Tamil Nadu, while there were leaders here who had stood up to the might of even the British. He, in fact, arrived only during the second stage of the struggle,” Pillai said. “He is a highly respected figure in Tamil Nadu, a social reformer. I am not going to say his name but you can easily guess who the man is,” he said.
The sub-text of Pillai’s argument was that an audacious Brahmin-hater was taking away the credit that belonged mostly to upper caste reformers. “When Stalin and the Kerala CM jointly inaugurated the man’s statue, there was no one to say please don’t, to say that it was all started by Sree Narayana Guru, to point out the source of (Satyagraha leader) T K Madhavan’s inspiration (which Pillai earlier in his speech had said was Swami Vivekananda), to explain how Mannathu Padmanabhan became its leader and led the ‘Savarna Jatha’ (an all-Kerala march of the progressive classes in support of Vaikom Satyagraha). Who is there in this new generation to take this history of Hindu renaissance to the people,” he said.
What’s more, Pillai said that the money for the Vaikom struggle flowed from Arya Samaj (founded by Vedic scholar Dayananda Saraswathi) in Lahore. “It was Rs 2000 from Arya Samaj that was the first contribution received by the satyagrahis,” he said. The mess was run by Punjabis, he said.
The Goa governor then lamented that books in Tamil Nadu teach school kids that “this man was the brain behind the Vaikom Satyagraha”. “Since I am a governor, I am not saying anything more. I will speak in detail after I am free of this gubernatorial responsibilities,” he said with a smile that was a mix of exasperation and mischief. Further, seemingly in jest, he added that he perhaps would be harmed if he visited Tamil Nadu after saying all this.
Pillai said that “the man” was called to Vaikom because many of the satyagraha’s leaders, like K P Kesava Menon and Madhavan, were jailed. “There were no leaders. This man was then a member of the Congress and so he came and courted arrest. I am not trying to denigrate him. But, when school books in Tamil Nadu teach that this man was the creator of the Vaikom Satyagraha, it is the negation of history. It is to brutally rip open history. We should raise our voice against this,” he said.
Pillai also revealed his deep dislike of Periyar’s anti-Brahmin stance. Like Periyar, the RSS, too, was against caste discrimination but, unlike Periyar, had never wished away the classification of people into different castes.
“Wasn’t it this man who said that if one sees a cobra and a person from a higher caste then kill the man first,” he said, and then added sarcastically: “That is also a kind of renaissance. The result of that reform is that there are still caste walls in Madurai. The lower castes in the villages surrounding Madurai are still made to hold coconut shells for glasses. And there are no brahmins left. Once they were 4% of the population, but when they were treated like snakes, they left for other shores and are now some of the finest scientists and hold other such top positions not just in America but also here in Thiruvannathapuram,” Pillai said.
Periyar spent an estimated 67 days actively participating in the movement and 74 days in prison during the Vaikom struggle. The Satyagraha ended in partial success in 1925, and three out of the four restricted streets around the Mahadevan Temple were opened to oppressed-caste communities after a compromise was reached with Regent Sethu Lakshmi Bayi.
A decade later, in 1936, came the Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation that was the culmination of the progressive forces let loose by the Vaikom Satyagraha.