In order to protest the biased stand of The Hindu and N.Ram on Tamils Genocide, MAY17 movement organized a protest in Chennai against Mr.N.Ram. Mr.N.Ram, Editor-In-Chief of The Hindu, was delivering a lecture on “Media & Politics” in the All India Conference of Medical & Pharma sales representative unions, affiliated to CITU in Chennai on 12th January 2010 at Kamarajar hall. Mr.N.Ram uses these kind of public gatherings and meetings to express his political agenda and cover the same in his news paper. This helps him to maintain the name that he never expresses his own views in his paper. Thus saving his neutrality and honesty. He always chooses a subject which is irrelevant to the meeting or the viewers he addresses and fits to his personal political agenda. (Earlier in November11, 2009 he addressed a book release function in which the book is on “Periyar and Dravidian movement”, he delivered a lecture on “India-China: Towards Strategic Cooperation”. In which he strongly supported the Chinese stand on claiming Arunachal Pradesh as the part of China and went strong and ugly on Tibetan Freedom movement by quoting Tibetan Buddhist Monks are “Thugs”)
The activists gathered in the venue distributed pamphlets. A photocopy of The Hindu’s 12 jan 2010 news item on Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Election manifesto as compared with other news paper’s coverage of the same issue is distributed to the conference participants. While The Hindu hailed, on 12th Jan, the manifesto as “Rajapaksa Promises a brighter future”, as against the Tamils’ opinion across the world as “disappointing and ruthless manifesto of Sinhala chavunism”.
The CITU leaders behaved undemocratically towards the demonstrators and warned the police that this protest would make them to lead as a Law & Order issue. Nearly one hour of argument with the protesters, the CITU strongly supporting Mr.N.Ram for his views, argued that the support for the Eelam struggle is a fake. They then complained to the police to disperse the protesters. The protest went successfully for nearly 1hour 30 mins on the Anna Salai.
