This Madurai-Based YouTuber is Trending and DMK Has a Role to Play in it

Chennai: The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has filed a complaint against a Madurai-based professor and YouTuber for publishing ‘offensive content’ against the MK Stalin-led party. Maridhas, who has his own YouTube channel, ‘Maridhas answers’, and written a book on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has recently been speaking out against the main Opposition party in Tamil Nadu.

The DMK, in its complaint to the city police commissioner, has demanded a thorough investigation into Maridhas’ statements against the party and taking down of the “offensive content” posted by the professor from all social media platforms.

“Mr Maridhas has published a series of statements through a video on his YouTube channel, on 18 August 2019, titled “தி.மு.க. தடை செய்யப்பட வேண்டுமா?” Should the DMK be banned?” link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJGdbc3Bofw- which are entirely baseless, false and intended to create public mischief… Maridhas primarily intends to disturb public tranquillity and promote enmity and incite hatred between religious groups, namely Muslims and non-Muslims. Mr Maridhas uses the recent policy statements issued by the DMK to buttress his efforts to ultimately create public mischief against Muslims, who are a minority in India…” read the DMK complaint.

“The reason for the statements reproduced hereinabove are that DMK has taken a stand critical of the abrogation of Article 370 and re-organisation of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The President of DMK, Thalapathi MK Stalin, issued a statement on August 5 pointing out that the manner of abrogation of Article 370 was anti-democratic, unconstitutional and against federal principles. It is the position of the DMK that the people of Kashmir must be consulted before any decision was taken with regard to the special status of their state,” it further said.

“It is well known that Kashmir is a Muslim-majority state in India. Therefore, the support extended by DMK towards the people of Kashmir for their fundamental rights like free speech and assembly, representative democracy and protection from unlawful arrest is being willfully misconstrued by Maridhas as support for terrorists. By doing so, Maridhas is portraying Muslims in Kashmir as terrorists and, thereby, creating ill-will against that group of people,” the complaint added.

The DMK has also claimed that the professor was running a website that lured innocent persons to donate money that in turn was being used to commit crimes and offences. Soon after, campaigns in favour of and against the young professor who recently published a book, titled ‘Naan en modi ah aadarikkiren’ (Why I am supporting Modi), have been initiated on social media.

While #IsupportMaridhas has started trending on Twitter and has more than 64,000 tweets so far, #MentalMaridhas has more than 30,000 tweets. The state BJP unit and DMK have been also been targeting each other on social media using the two trending hashtags.