Responding to criticism from Tamil nationalist P Nedumaran, DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi on Thursday reiterated his earlier statement that he was a “true communist”, pointing out that he had named his son after the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Karunanidhi’s comments, which were part of a letter published in a party newspaper, came after a recent editorial in a vernacular daily by Nedumaran, which attacked him for calling himself a communist. Declaring that he had done a number of things to prove his communist leanings, the octogenarian leader said “I named my son Stalin, not now, but 60 years ago. How can Nedumaran ask when I behaved like a communist?”.
In the course of his rebuttal, Karunanidhi affirmed that he had nothing to do with the wealth his family allegedly amassed. “He (Nedumaran) says my family members have become ultra-rich. What can I do for that? I may be happy seeing them earning in an honest manner. But do I own any of it?,” asked Karunanidhi.
He added that another sign of being a true communist was the fact that he still lived in the house he bought before he tasted power. “DMK had been instrumental in sending CPM’s TK Rangarajan and CPI’s D Raja to the Rajya Sabha. Is that against communism?,” he asked.