Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin on Thursday, April 3, announced that a statue of Communist ideologue Karl Marx will be installed soon in the state capital of Chennai. “Our Dravidian model government wishes to commemorate and applaud this great leader,” the CM said.
The announcement was made in the state Assembly alongside a string of other announcements including that the DMK would be legally challenging the Union government’s Wafq Amendment Bill recently passed in the Lok Sabha.
“Karl Marx gave us the slogan ‘workers of the world unite’,” the CM said referring to the famed rallying cry from Marx and Friedrich Engels’ book The Communist Manifesto. “Marx is the revolutionary leader who gave this slogan to the working classes across the world. It was him who also instilled the faith that ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.’ There are many historical figures who are celebrated, but only a few have changed history itself. Marx is one of them,” Stalin also said in the Assembly.
He further added, “Marx’ ideologies form the bedrock of many global revolutions and for the many changes witnessed by the world. It was based on the ideal of equal opportunity for all that we decided to present the 2025 state budget on March 14—Marx’ death anniversary.”
Stalin also said, “At a time when hardly anyone was writing about India, it was Marx who wrote extensively and correctly about the country.” The CM was referring to Marx, and to a lesser extent, Engels’, articles published in the New York Daily Tribune in the early 1850s. “This is why Periyar was the first to translate The Communist Manifesto into Tamil. It is fitting that his statue will be put up in Chennai where labour unions were formed more than a 100 years ago,” the CM added.