DMK criticizes BJP Tamil Nadu chief over its leader’s temple demolition speech

Chennai:

The ruling DMK in Tamil Nadu has slammed BJP state chief K Annamalai for tweeting a short video clip of its leader TR Balu’s speech on temple demolition, alleging that a portion of his longer speech was selectively cut. Given so that they feel that they are proud of. Destruction of temples. While in the portion shared by Mr. Annamalai, Mr. Balu is seen boasting about temple demolition in his constituency, the full speech shows him explaining his model – how he rebuilt temples as a Union minister which were demolished for highway projects, after persuading the devotees. DMK has called the former IPS officer a “cut and paste Annamalai”.

“I have demolished 100 years old temple, same TR Balu has demolished Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati temples on GST Road at one place in my constituency. I know it will not get votes. But I also know how To get votes,” Mr Balu can be heard saying in the clip tweeted by the BJP leader.

DMK people take pride in demolishing 100 year old Hindu temples.

This is the reason why we want to dissolve HR&CE and want the temple to be free from the clutches of the government. pic.twitter.com/c4AQTaRkPN

— K Annamalai (@annamalai_k) January 29, 2023

However, the longer speech, which can be found on YouTube, showed him explaining how he built bigger temples for devotees because there was no way for the infrastructure project to avoid demolition.

He said, “If you see on GST Road, earlier there were these three temples. It was I who demolished these three temples. I know it will not get votes. But I also know how to get votes. Votes will not get I said I have no other way. For them, we need to build another temple, that’s right? I said we will build beautiful, better and a bigger temple with a hall that can seat 100 or 200 people people to eat. In many places, large Mandapam were built. We demolished temples and built beautiful new temples. We convinced the believers and got it done,” Mr. Balu said.