By G Babu Jayakumar & D Sekar

Copyright deccanchronicle

CHENNAI: Terming power as responsibility and not a means to acquire posts, Chief Minister M K Stalin said politics was to serve the people, which was not a luxury but a hard work that had impelled the DMK, working with the people and functioning as their voice, to bring about changes for the betterment of the people and the society. Launching the ‘Anbu Karangal’ (Loving Hands) welfare scheme as part of the Thaiyumanavar scheme to provide an assistance of Rs 2000 per month to children without parents till they reached the age of 18 at the Kalaivanar Arangam on Monday, Stalin said the Dravidian Movement was basically a revolt of the oppressed people who were denied education with a view to keeping education and knowledge out of their reach in the Indian social context. Though the Dravidian Model could be explained as ‘everything for everyone,’ it was not easy to strive for it and achieve that, he said adding that to meet the needs of the people they had to put in hard work by being at one place in the morning, another far away venue hundreds of kilometres away in the evening. Such hard work was taught to them by leaders like Periyar E V Ramasamy, C N Annadurai and M Karunanidhi and it had helped them understand the needs of the people in the lowest rung of the socioeconomic order, he said. Some people think that politics was about coming to power, forgetting the responsibility and spending some time reveling in the benefits of the posts and then bringing in some glamorous projects before preparing for the elections driven by the lust for power, he said. But for the DMK power was to fight for the common people and to be responsible, not get positions. Under the Anbu Karangal scheme, 6082 children without parents would get an assistance of Rs 2000, he said, raising the question if the envisaging of the scheme was driven by electoral politics. Similarly, if serving breakfast to 21 lakh students in schools and all the schemes meant for the benefit and welfare of the differently abled people and the transgendered population were aimed at electoral politics, he asked. Though the DMK assumed power at the height of the Coronavirus epidemic and helped the victims in several ways including extending assistance to children who lost their parents, the party never played electoral politics on human misery, he said. Listing out a plethora of welfare schemes launched by his government to support the deprived sections of society, he said his government would never do anything to help people for the sake of votes. The DMK won votes because of the people’s confidence in them and the power gained through that people’s confidence would only be used to uplift the unfortunate sections in the lowest rung of society, he said.