New Delhi: Former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa will address a rally in Uttar Pradesh in Hindi on Sunday to become the first top Tamil Nadu leader to bridge the north-south language divide.
Jayalalithaa's speech in the town of Bareilly in the company of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and others will mark a major leap from those tumultuous times when Tamil Nadu rose in frenzy against Hindi.
Although Jayalalithaa is fluent in Hindi besides half a dozen other languages, including English, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada, no political leader of repute from Tamil Nadu has addressed a rally in the Hindi heartland.
"It is a revolution," said a Rajya Sabha member of Jayalalitha's AIADMK party, K Malaisamy. "It goes to our leader's credit that she has been invited to address the people in Uttar Pradesh and it is also to the credit of Tamil Nadu and Tamil people," Malaisamy said.
The Sunday meeting in Bareilly, about 250 kilometre from here, will bring together Jayalalithaa, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief N Chandrababu Naidu, Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) chief Om Prakash Chautala, Asom Gana Parishad leader Brindaban Goswami and former external affairs minister K Natwar Singh.
All of them, mostly regional satraps, are using the Uttar Pradesh electoral battle that began Saturday to flex their muscles ahead of the next parliamentary elections due in two years.
But it will mark a watershed in India's polity where the Hindi-Tamil clash of the 1960s - also the decade when the DMK officially gave up its separatist plank - has given way to growing assimilation of different ethnic groups in a larger federal entity despite continuing hiccups.
Another AIADMK leader who did not want to be identified by name said that Jayalalithaa's speech Sunday is bound to have a positive impact on Tamil Nadu and the country as a whole.
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