Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) will hold a demonstration on June 11 in Chennai urging the Centre and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to remove a cartoon from the twelfth standard Social Science textbook that ridicules the anti-Hindi agitation and the students who participated in it.
In a statement here, the party’s General Secretary Vaiko said the cartoon, by giving the assumption that the students of Tamil Nadu knew neither English nor Hindi, had hurt the sentiments of Tamils and humiliated the student community as a whole.
“The students who participated in the anti-Hindi agitation had good knowledge of English and wanted to continue English as the official language. They opposed Hindi, because they feared that it would relegate Tamils into a secondary citizen in the country,” Mr. Vaiko explained.
He said a total of 65 student-agitators had fallen prey to the bullets of the Indian Army, which was deployed in the State to quell the student unrest, and eight other agitators committed self-immolation.
“This led to the Congress losing power in the state in 1967 and Anna after becoming the Chief Minister announced in the Assembly that Hindi would have no place in the State,” Mr. Vaiko said.
