A few days ago, we saw the IIT Madras head, Prof Kamakoti Veezhinathan, praising the Stalin government for the quality of laptops they had given the students of the state.
One would wonder how a Dravidianist party that denounced Brahmins, whose ideologue called for the genocide of Brahmins, can share a stage with one? That too with Prof Kamakoti, whose IIT is giving sleepless nights to the Dravidianists – haven’t you heard the man who vulgarized Lord Nataraja claim SC students are unaliving themselves at IIT more in number than Brahmin kids?
Why did they have to bring Dr Kamakoti on stage and have him praise the government? The answer lies in the fact that they crave Brahmin validation just as much as they crave the white man’s validation. Dravidianists entire existence will become zilch, worthless if you remove Brahmin from the equation. Some days ago, a Prof Jayaraman spoke about an arithmetic formula where he said Tamil – Parpaan (Brahmin) = Dravidian.
Professor Jayaraman: explains who is a #Dravidian clearly using arithmetic.
10 minus 4 = 6
5 minus 2 = 3
..like that
Tamils minus (Paarpanar) TamilBrahmins = Dravidians !!
😍they point to electoral success as proof of #TwoNations pic.twitter.com/qXky157ORo
— Reality Check India (@realitycheckind) January 4, 2026
Let us change this a bit; Dravidianism – Brahmin = 0.
For all the talk about 100 years of social justice and taking pride in driving out Brahmins from Tamil Nadu, the Dravidianists still keep talking about the minuscule percentage that continues to live in the state. Remove Brahmins from the discourse, and the Dravidianist ecosystem will collapse.
Their so-called enemy’s existence is what keeps them alive. Dare them to speak about the other castes in the state, they won’t. Truth be told, the Justice Party came to existence because of a few disgruntled landed dominante caste members upset with the upward economic mobility of Brahmins. On the other hand, the Dravidianist DMK had to take the help of Rajaji, a Brahmin, to come to power.
For a movement that keeps claiming it has “annihilated Brahminism,” it simply cannot stop talking about Brahmins. Everything, right from when they wake up, take a dump, till they go to bed, everything still revolves around them. Their speeches, textbooks, pop culture, and conferences – all have the same common feature – bash the Brahmin.
“அட என்ன தப்பு யாரு செஞ்சாலும்”
Lets sing it together:
“பாப்பான திட்டு கள்ளவாகட்டு” 😂 pic.twitter.com/widmz9azSY
— Indhavaainko (இந்தாவாய்ங்கோ) 👊 (@indhavaainko) August 31, 2023
And now even government events have to feature a Brahmin to have legitimacy. Just remove that Brahmin from the equation, as Prof Jayaraman did, and the whole thing has nothing to lean against; it just collapses. No enemy. No villain. No one to blame.
That’s why a Brahmin on stage matters so much. Not because of his expertise. Not because of governance. Because optics. “Look, even a Brahmin is praising us. Even they approve.”, that is the validation they want, badly. Ideology goes straight into the dustbin when insecurity rises.
This is also why caste is used so selectively. Brahmins are easy targets – politically and numerically insignificant. The safest punching bags. You can abuse them freely. Call them anything. Attribute anything to them. Ancient history, even when humans didn’t exist, modern problems, suicides, failures – stretch it back to even a zillion years – the blame is always on the paarpaan, the Brahmin. Who cares about evidence as long as the one who is blamed is the Brahmin?
There is no such sustained attack on dominant non-Brahmin castes. No serious questioning of who actually holds power today. No real discussion of internal hierarchies within the Dravidian ecosystem. No account of how the Scheduled Castes have lived under governments that endlessly boast about establishing “social justice.” That conversation never happens and will never happen. Because that mirror is dangerous – it is looking at them.
So the Brahmin is kept alive in the story, mocked when convenient, abused when useful, summoned when legitimacy is required, dismissed, and then quietly brought back on stage when a photo-op is needed – rinse and repeat.
Remove the Brahmin from the narrative, and what remains isn’t social justice. It’s a power structure that doesn’t want to reflect upon itself. That is why the obsession doesn’t end. And that is why, after a hundred years of claiming victory, the supposedly defeated enemy still sits right at the Centre of their politics.
Hydra is a political writer.
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