All India Annaravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) Chief J. Jayalalithaa has blamed Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi and his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) for fanning religious tension.
Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu) / New Delhi, Sept. 27 : All India Annaravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) Chief J. Jayalalithaa has blamed Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi and his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) for fanning religious tension.
"Karunanidhi should either resign immediately or the Central Government sack DMK's ministers in the central government and fire the minority government of Tamil Nadu," Jayalalitha said.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has already demanded the dismissal of the Karunanidhi-led Government in Tamil Nadu.
Meanwhile, activists of the Shiv Sena Hindustan staged protests and set a fire an effigy of Karunanidhi in New Delhi.
"We will not tolerate the insult of Lord Rama at any cost. It is very shameful that a chief minister in India does not know the greatness and power of Rama. Such a chief minister should hold his head in shame," said J. C. Sharma, President of Delhi state unit of Shiv Sena Hindustan.
Protests continued to rage across India weeks after Karunanidhi made a controversial remark about Lord Rama.
Karunanidhi, a self claimed atheist and rationalist, had recently said that Lord Ram was a fallacy as tall as the Himalayas.
His statement came amidst a raging row over a Central Government affidavit filed before the Supreme Court earlier this month in support of the ship lane project, which said that Hinduism's most important texts are not proof of the existence of Hindu gods.
However, the government backtracked on the 'affidavit' and sought three months time from the court to file an amended one, following threats of nationwide protests by the BJP and other radical Hindu organisations.
Hindu groups are already up in arms over the Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project.
They have called on the government to stop the project, saying it would demolish a mythical bridge linking India and Sri Lanka, believed to have been built by Lord Ram.
Opposing the 560 million dollars project, they say it would destroy the Ramar Setu, a 48-kilometer chain of limestone shoals that once linked Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu to Mannar in Sri Lanka.
ANI