With the 2026 assembly election round the corner, the Sangh Parivar, to counter the pro-Tamil narrative of the ruling DMK, has chosen to cling to lord Murugan, considered a Tamil god, by holding a conference on Sunday in Madurai in an attempt to consolidate a Hindu vote bank,

Though Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath gave a miss to the event, Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister and Jana Sena Party (JSP) president Pawanm Kalyan was in attendance and gave a fiery speech, dubbing secularism as Hindu bashing. Addressing the conference, organized by the Hindu Munnani (Hindu Front), an RSS affiliate, he said atheists in the country ridiculing only Hindu gods dare not touch the semitic religions of Islam or Christianity, which have come from the Arab region.

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“The Constitution protects our Dharma. But, in the name of secularism, the atheistic crowd continues to ridicule my god and culture which has come to be the norm of secularism in the country. Can they criticize the semitic faiths? A leader of a political party questions why a conference for Murugan in Madurai and why not in Uttar Pradesh or elsewhere. It is dangerous. Lord Murugan is a Tamil god, with his presence all over the country and abroad. Don’t try to needle us. Fort, if we retort, it will be uncontrollable,” he said, hitting out at the DMK and its allies, without naming them.

However, to assert that Hindu consolidation could overcome any hurdle, he banked on the Dravidian rhetoric saying “If this army fails, who else can win”. “I have every right to celebrate my faith. And lord Murugan is the first revolutionary leader (in Tamil Nadu only late Chief Minister and matinee icon MGR had the honorific ‘revolutionary leader’) of the world since he had practiced equality and destroyed injustice.

The conference comes in the backdrop of the Sangh Parivar’s failed attempt to foment communal strife in Thiruparangkundram, in Madurai, one of the famed six abodes of the lord. The hillock where the temple is situated also had a 15th century darga, built by a Hindu king and worshipped by people of all faiths. The BJP and RSS affiliated outfits created an issue of animal sacrifice, a usual practice at the darga atop the hillock, but it had fizzled out. The issue had been long settled by the Privy Council, London, during the colonial period.

Since the Ram temple movement had no traction in Tamil Nadu, Union Minister L Murugan had launched a ‘Vel Yatra’ across the state, covering all the six abodes of Murugan, when he was the state BJP president. But that too had not yielded the desired result, say observers. Also this conference comes in the wake of the war of words between the DMK government of MK Stalin and the Modi government over the later returning the Keezhadi excavation report, which places a highly developed industrialised urban culture in the ancient Tamil country at BCE 6. THe DMK had used this to paint the BJP as anti-Tamil.

Protesting the holding of the conference as an attempt at creating communal strife, minor Left political parties and civil society organisations have held a massive Human Chain on Saturday in Madurai city. Earlier, the DMK had questioned the participation of Yogi Adityanath at the conference.