At yesterday’s legislative assembly meeting, Finance Minister Marivilson said, “I am a Christian by birth. My religion has taught me the language of love, compassion, and mercy. Even those who have studied Tamil may not know this. I have read it in the Bible.”
BJP state president Nainar Nagendran has posted that Minister Maria Wilson should apologize for this speech.
Regarding this, on his X page, “With the authority of our Tamil language, is it right to compare and speak about a religion, Minister Mariavilson?”

If, during the debate in the legislature about your command of language, you had stopped at “My religion has taught me a lot,” that would have been your personal experience. But when you say, “What my religion has taught me cannot be understood no matter how much Tamil one studies,” it comes across as an attack on Tamil.
The language that swallowed up all the meanings various religions have assigned to the word “love” in a single line—“Does even love have a lock and key?”—is our mother tongue, Tamil.
Who in this world can explain compassion more subtly than Vallalar’s principle of life-giving kindness: “Whenever I saw a withered crop, I withered too”? If you have properly read and understood the Purananuru verse, “Neither evil nor good comes from others,” then you would know the profound meaning of the word “peace” in the Tamil language.
By birth, you may belong to any religion, but in feeling, you must understand that we are all Tamils.

Even in the Legislative Assembly, didn’t your party leadership point that out as well? In that case, there is nothing wrong with you upholding your religion. But we can never accept you belittling the Tamil language. Therefore, today, in your emotional outburst, you must publicly apologize for the unfair criticism you made against the Tamil language,” he noted.
BJP former state president Tamilisai Soundararajan said, "In the morning, they pass a resolution elevating Tamil for the Tamil mother. In the evening, a minister belonging to the ruling party has spoken in a way that suggests Tamil has nothing to do with love, and as if only the religion he belongs to teaches love, which is strongly condemnable.

Long before the religion that says “Love itself is Shiva,” Tamil had taught love along with spirituality for thousands of years. I respect everyone’s mother tongue. At the same time, the oddity of passing a resolution for Tamil in the morning and then writing in Malayalam while speaking Tamil has happened only in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly.
So what they say and what they do are two different things. They are showing that Tamil exists only in their words, not in their lives," he has posted.
