Respected @mkstalin avl I'm writing this to you with great pain in my heart and at the same time finding enormous relief at putting into words a grief that I have carried for a very long time. You may perhaps be aware (but dozens of abusive handles that claim to be DMK are not aware)... that the last book which I translated, under commission by Sahitya Akademi, was the literary biography of your father authored by Prof Dr Ma. Rajendran. I was extremely saddened by the time the book translation work came to me--having been at the receiving end of unspeakable and relentless abuse because of a stray post on Savukku Shankar, an YouTuber who has been savagely hunted down by your regime. Yet, for all my misgivings & sadness at how I was treated in the online spaces by DMK affiliates & members, I gave my everything to that book for one reason, and one reason only... my appa has never asked anything from me in my life, and I could not bear to reject his request. My father is everything to me, and most of all his lesson to me has been to never let anyone pull me down because I happen to be a woman. You are the son of your father, someone who has been five times the Chief Minister of this state. You may not even be in a position to fathom my pain. Whenever I faced shameful character-assassinating abuse from the DMK ecosystem, I have cried myself to sleep thinking-- they are going after me because my father is a nobody in their eye. Because I do not have a father big enough to fight for me, I have to stand on my own feet and fight for myself. Here I am fighting. What you may also not be aware of, & what I need to painfully remind everyone is that I'm also a mother. I raise two children, I'm the sole breadwinner & every day I struggle to give them the quality of the life we left behind in London. I barely sleep, I know nothing except work but yet to be called a prostitute/ RSS sleeper cell by your party-affiliate handles will earn you a Tamil mother's curse. Also, my kids are in primary school but they read everything. When I was younger, my biggest fear was that in the event of my being arrested my children would not even know my name. Now, because they know my name, they are also painfully aware of what is being said about me. And yes, my children read Tamil. If fascists call me names, I can always tell them--this is what fascists do. My comrade's grandfather was in the Resistance against the Nazis, Cedric himself was active in revolutionary politics for two decades of his life, so fighting fascism is not new to my family. How do I as a mother explain the hatred that is spewed against me everytime I say anything crticial of police excesses, crimes against women, the atrocities on Dalits, the ugly patronage of a poet-molester, and so on. Do I tell them that these people are also fascists because they cannot tolerate any criticism? Or do I tell them that misogyny has impregnated our political landscape that a woman who does not join the groupthink of DMK echochambers automatically becomes an object of ruthless attack. How is it possible that I can write/speak on the genocide of Palestinians, challenge US imperialism, write centrespreads against paramilitary excesses during Operation Khagar criticising Home Minister Amit Shah... but.. as a Tamil woman I cannot write a tweet mildly critical of your govt or its machinery without being subject to vile abuse and unimaginable slander. I do not have an easy answer to the fundamental contradiction: if one of the biggest dangers from far-right is rampant misogyny, then, I'm already inhabiting & suffering under it. How has it come about? If this is a monster you cannot control it exposes your powerlessness. If it is a monster that you do not want to control--instead using proxy attacks as a silencing mechanism -- then you are no different than the fascists you warn us about. Between these inconvenient questions, I've decided that for my own clarity, I must address this letter to you.
