Addressing the media on Madras High Court premises on Wednesday, N Divya announced she wanted to separate from her husband of 10 months.
With a battery of lawyers, many from the PMK, standing behind her, Divya, the girl from Dharmapuri, whose love affair with E Ilavarasan led to large-scale violence last year, said she no longer harboured any emotions for her husband.
“Under no circumstance am I ready to live with him (Ilavarasan) again. I want to be with my mother and compensate for the loss of my father,” she said, much to the shock of the crowd.
But her voice gave her away. Her cracking voice revealed the intense emotional turmoil that she has been subjected to over 10 months. Her simple wish to marry the man she loved was met with stiff opposition from her family. Her father’s suicide over her elopement was used as a revival plank for casteist politics in the state, disrupting communal harmony and leading to widespread violence against Dalits.
A day after Divya made the statement abandoning Ilavarasan for her mother, his body was found near a railway track in Dharmapuri. With Ilavarasan now dead, the loss on Divya’s side is only mounting.
It all began in October last year. After being in love with Ilavarasan (which means Prince in Tamil) for months, Divya finally mustered the courage to seek permission from her family to marry him. The Dalit youth had a bright future ahead. He had cleared all tests for recruitment into the police department and was awaiting appointment.
A member of the Vanniyar community, a higher caste that has a long history of turbulence with the Dalits, Divya did have some idea of the trouble that was bound to come her way.
However, Naickenkottai, the village she and Ilavarasan hailed from, is no stranger to inter-caste marriages with many Vanniyar women crossing over to the Dalit colony to lead happy married lives.
But what she could not have fathomed was the larger political context into which her love story was going to get embroiled. The PMK, a Vanniyar party, which was on the brink of obliteration after the 2011 Assembly polls, had been upping its anti-Dalit rhetoric to gain back lost votes.
After the proposal was vehemently opposed, the two eloped and married on October 14 and then took refuge with Salem DIG Sanjay Kumar.
Divya went to Ilavarasan’s house to start her new life, turning down pleadings of her parents to return. But with community pressure mounting over the “humiliation” of his daughter running away with a Dalit, Divya’s father, G Nagarajan, committed suicide on November 7.
Even before Nagarajan’s body could be cremated, a large mob descended on three Dalit villages of Natham Colony, Kodampatti and Anna Nagar and went on the rampage. Verbal abuses were hurled at women. Houses were burnt and belongings looted.
What makes Divya’s latest statement so startling is the fact that even after the loss of her father, she stuck to her stand of staying with Ilavarasan.
While Divya continued to stay with Ilavarasan, the PMK derived as much political mileage as it could from the incident. Its members ransacked another Dalit village in Marakannam before the party’s meeting in Mamallapuram. Dalit houses were looted, like in Dharmapuri. The meeting saw vitriolic speeches by the likes of Ramadoss, who warned of violence if Dalit youth continued to enact their “love dramas.”
What violence could not achieve was done by emotional threats. On June 3, Ilavarasan filed a complaint that Divya was missing. She had received a call from her mother and had gone to meet her. She did not return, but sent a message that she wanted a divorce.
When the Habeas Corpus petition her mother filed came up for hearing on June 6, Divya said she wanted to live with her mother and in an act of symbolism, she was seen without her thali. Ilavarasan, just a few feet away, looked shattered.
On Thursday, a day after she announced that she felt nothing for Ilavarasan, he was found dead. Divya fainted when she heard the news and was inconsolable.