Saravana Suresh, 50, who set himself on fire on Friday morning in protest against the Centre’s failure to constitute the Cauvery Management Board, succumbed to burns on Saturday to become the second martyr in as many days in the agitation for CMB.
Suresh is the son of Ramanujam, brother-in-law of MDMK leader Vaiko. In a statement released on Friday, Vaiko had said that Suresh resorted to the extreme step after hearing his speech against the Centre and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the callous attitude towards Tamil Nadu. “Suresh had watched on TV my speech on Thursday and the Prime Minister’s visit to Chennai. When his wife Amudha enquired, Suresh had told her that he was not feeling alright after listening to the speech,” Vaiko said in the statement.
On Friday morning, Suresh left home and set himself ablaze with kerosene. The Virudhunagar police rushed him to the nearby hospital where he battled for life for almost 24 hours before succumbing to the 90 per cent burns.
On Thursday Dharmalingam, a 25 year old youth in Erode district committed self immolation reportedly over the failure of the Centre to constitute the CMB. A class 8 drop out, Dharmalingam, was moved by the speech delivered by Vaiko over the Cauvery issue before he took to the extreme step. But his relations expressed ignorance about any suicide note left behind by him.
The Dravidian media is agog wit reports eulogising such self- immolations. “Self sacrifice is the zenith of all forms of protest,” a pro-left daily in Chennai has quoted Prof V Arasu, former department of Tamil, University of Madras, as saying.
Self- immolations for political reasons are not unusual in Tamil Nadu. The State saw many youngsters resorting to self-immolation at the peak of the Eelam War in Sri lanka between the lTTE and the lankan Army . The lTTE terrorists were the ones who set this trend by turning themselves into suicide bombers and volunteers who took fast unto death to popularise the demand for Eelam.