Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

"Periyar clarifies, “There is nothing to feel surprised or hesitant about breaking Pillayar idol. Please let me know if there were a better means of expressing our feelings, you sudra ministers, sudra members of parliament and the legislature, educators including vice chancellors, reputed millionaires, scholars, lords, former zamindars, former maharajas, Sri La Sri Heads of mutts! I am prepared to give a patient hearing to you.”"

"To destroy caste discrimination burn the pictures of Nehru and Gandhi and also the Constitution of India. If all these methods fail to give us results, then we should start beating and killing the Brahmins; we should start burning their houses."

"An earlier anti-Brahmin activist, Ramaswamy Naicker, had said that "we will do with the Brahmins what Hitler did with the Jews". Another slogan of his was: "If you see a snake and a Brahmin, kill the Brahmin first"."

"I strongly condemn the statement of a BJP leader and a Member of Parliament that the BJP has come here to eradicate ‘Periyarism’ (Periyar policy) in Tamil Nadu. Father Periyar was the one who fought and won against the poisonous policy of ‘Sanatana Dharma’."

"When the first wife of EVR Nagammai wanted to go to temple, EVR could not win over her by his arguments. So he secretly went to some of his ‘minor’ friends and showed them his first wife and told them that she was a new Dasi in the town asking them to make her consent to their desires. Consequently they started teasing and stalking her from the temple. Traumatised by this his wife stopped attending the temple. Later she came to know that this was a trick played by her rationalist husband."

"The enormous privileges given to Brahmins by the Vedas were sacrosanct only as long as they went unchallenged. The challenge rose in the Tamil country like a whirlwind spearheaded by an iconoclast who questioned the Vedas and the gods as well. He took apparently extremist positions on some issues, but the fundamental nature of the social revolution he wrought was clear even to its victims. The political perspectives of Tamil Nadu and with it much of India, were altered with as seeming finality by Ramaswamy Naicker."

"While Jaffrelot resorts to convoluted ways to invent racism in the Hindu polity, he develops a blind eye to the racism prevalent in the forging of Dravidian identity. He eulogizes E.V. Ramasami as an ‘egalitarian in a western individualist vein’. Jaffrelot completely glosses over the fact that Kudi Arasu , the official journal of Ramasami's movement, praises Hitler explicitly and draws parallels between Jews and Brahmins. Kudi Arasu quotes at length Hitler's reasons for despising Jews, as found in Mein Kampf and how he vowed to purge alleged Jewish dominance in the German society. It admiringly describes how Hitler accomplished his avowed promise of ending Jewish dominance in Germany, and it warns that the Brahmins of South India pose the same danger as the Jews of pre-Nazi Germany. He praises the racist Afro-Dravidianism of Periyar as ‘an explicitly ethnic conception of the low castes’ identity'. He compares their situation to that of the blacks in South Africa."

"Old and senile man like Periyar deserve a place in lunatic asylum rather than in public life."

"Let him be put in a lunatic asylum and his perverted mind treated there."

"His main thesis was that Brahmins had debased Dravidian culture, which in turn had demoralized non-Brahmin youth; and that in order to salvage Dravidian culture from its impure state, Brahminical priesthood and Sanskritic scriptural tradition must be destroyed and Brahminical religious practitioners expelled from Dravidian-Tamil society."

"On occasion, DK Leader E.V. Ramaswami Naicker has called for Brahmin killings and burning of agraharams (Brahmin quarters of cities and towns) . . . These various elements of Dravidian movement's populism have been linked together and given overall coherence by the conspiratorial and demonological theme of anti-Brahminism. . . . The movement also expresses itself in direct action. In recent years EVR and DK have carried on campaigns to erase Hindi lettering from railroad signs, to burn effigies of Rama and smash 'idols' of Hindu deities, to burn the Indian flag, or remove or erase the term Brahmin displayed at 'Hotels' (cafes or restaurants) to burn the Indian Constitution and destroy statues of Gandhi and to burn the maps of India."