Will Tamil Nadu’s Legacy of Coexistence Becomes a Model for India’s Future, Or a Casualty of its Present

I grew up in Tirunelveli, a city in Tamil Nadu about 120 kilometers from Thirupparankundram. Thirukarthigai — or Karthigai Deepam — was one of those festivals that needed no explanation. We didn’t light lamps for Deepavali in my house; we waited for Thirukarthigai, usually a month later, when the rows of agal vilakku felt more meaningful. There was always a gentle competition with neighbors over whose lines of lamps were straighter and brighter, always a wind or drizzle threatening to extinguish the first wick, always the special Karthigai snacks my mother made, and always that soft glow that made even the quietest streets feel alive.

And then came the sokkapanai, the grand climax of the evening — those tall conical structures made of dried palm leaves, set alight at selected street corners. Thousands would gather to watch them burn. The one near our home rose about 25 to 30 feet, but the most famous one — not far away — was nearly 75 feet tall. Imagine a towering structure in the middle of a busy street going up in flames, lighting the night sky. It was exhilarating, entrancing. Karthigai Deepam was a festival of lights in the simplest, most literal sense: warm, familiar, unpoliticized. Sokkapanai symbolized the infinite form of Lord Shiva, which was the very origin of this festival.

Thirupparankundram was equally familiar — a place I visited throughout my childhood during our quarterly trips to Madurai, whether for temple visits or family outings. A hill that felt both sacred and ordinary in the way only deeply local places can. Its coexistence of shrines felt natural to us, not something that required commentary.

Only now do I realize how fragile that naturalness was.

Heritage, Harmony, and the Hill

Karthigai Deepam — also known as Thirukarthigai — is more than a festival. It is a glowing fragment of Tamil heritage, observed across homes and temples with reverence and joy. Rows of lamps pierce the darkness, symbolizing wisdom, continuity, and the endurance of traditions that have survived centuries. For Tamils, this day is not merely ritual; it is about community, identity, and belonging.

Thirupparankundram, one of the Arupadai Veedu, the six sacred abodes of Lord Muruga, sits at the heart of this cultural memory. The hill itself narrates a long history of coexistence, each layer holding a story:

At the base stands the Murugan temple — the famed Muthal Padai Veedu (“First Battle House”).
Midway up rises the Deepa Thoon, the historic fire pillar where Karthigai Deepam was traditionally lit in accordance with agamic and local customs.
A short climb away stands a 19th-century survey marker stone placed by the British during the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India.
Higher still, the Uchi Pillayar temple crowns the summit — a more recent structure, but for decades now the place from which the Deepam has been lit, its glow visible for miles.
And on another face of the hill endures the Sikkandar Dargah, a revered Islamic shrine that has long been part of the hill’s spiritual fabric.

For generations, these sites held a delicate but stable equilibrium. Hindus worship at the Murugan and Pillayar temples, Muslims pray at the Dargah, and the Deepa Thoon stands quietly in between — each tradition respecting its history, its space, and its neighbors.

Today, that balance is under a deliberate and calculated assault.

Manufactured Conflict and the Politics of Homogenization

The current controversy revolves around demands — amplified by the RSS, BJP, and Sangh affiliates — to shift the Deepam lighting to the survey marker stone. Their claim: “tradition” requires it. But the narrative does not withstand scrutiny. The marker stone is not the historical Deepa Thoon. Even documents submitted by the RSS in court acknowledge the distinction. The conflation is engineered and intentional. By insisting on lighting the lamp at a site located close to the Dargah, these groups are manufacturing a new point of friction — an imported conflict wrapped in the language of heritage.

The Tamil Nadu government, meanwhile, has been consistent:

The Deepam continues at the summit’s Pillayar temple, as it has for years.
Lighting it at the survey stone — without precedent, without agamic sanction, and situated adjacent to another community’s sacred space — has never been permitted, and with good reason.

Adding to the surrealism, many of the loudest provocateurs are non-native Tamils who arrive at a Murugan temple — one of the most distinctly Tamil cultural spaces — and begin chanting “Jai Shriram” and “Bharat Mata ki Jai.” If the situation weren’t so dangerous, it would qualify as high comedy: a cultural remix nobody asked for, staged entirely for political effect.

Over the last eleven years, this brand of politics — repackaging folklore as immutable dogma, weaponizing administrative processes, and using courts as battlegrounds for cultural revisionism — has grown more confident and more deeply embedded.

But there is nothing accidental about this mismatch. It flows directly from the Sangh Parivar’s ideological endgame: an India flattened into one religion, one god, one language — Hinduism in its Brahminical framing, Ram as its eternal mascot, and Hindi as its unquestioned cultural default. Anything outside this manufactured template — Tamilness, Murugan worship, regional customs — must either be folded into this narrative or overwritten by it. In this worldview, even a peaceful hill with centuries of shared spiritual history is simply another canvas for homogenization.

What is happening in Thirupparankundram is therefore not a dispute about a ritual.
It is part of a larger political playbook.

Across India, whenever a region proves resistant to Hindutva politics, the strategy is to probe for cracks — however small — and turn coexistence into contestation. Shared spaces become zero-sum, and even the most harmonious traditions become grounds for division. Tamil Nadu, with its century-long tradition of pluralism, rationalist thought, and social justice, has been particularly immune to the Sangh’s worldview. Yet Thirupparankundram shows the persistence of the project and the sophistication of the tools being deployed.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the role of the RSS’s legal wing: the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad (ABAP).

Over three decades, as documented by The Caravan, ABAP has quietly built a nationwide network of ideologically aligned lawyers — stretching from district courts to the Supreme Court. Its members have become judges, advocates-general, Union law officers, and key actors in “strategic litigation” around Ayodhya, Kandhamal, Jahangirpuri, and other manufactured flashpoints.

This network does not merely fight individual cases. It works to reshape the legal common sense of the system — pushing Hindutva narratives into judicial records and administrative reasoning. A familiar choreography plays out across the country:

Street mobilisation and propaganda by Sangh outfits.
Courtroom battles where ABAP lawyers push for orders that retrospectively legitimize those campaigns.
Judicial language shifts, and with it, the boundaries of what is treated as precedent, custom, or “common sense.”

Seen against this backdrop, Thirupparankundram is not about “religious belief.”
It is about which ecosystem now has the power to bend judicial discretion.

The Legal Capture and the Road Ahead

This became evident when Justice G.R. Swaminathan overturned the district administration’s detailed law-and-order assessment and elevated a recently asserted, unproven ritual claim over a century-old, peacefully followed custom. The administration — charged with maintaining peace — imposed reasonable restrictions. The judge tore up that determination, insisted that a controversial, newly demanded ritual site with no historical precedent must be used, dictated police deployment, and threatened punitive consequences if his religiously tinted preference was not obeyed.

This was not merely judicial overreach. It was the very style of assertive, ideological judging that ABAP has been cultivating and rewarding.

What we are witnessing in Thirupparankundram is therefore a symptom of something deeper: structural capture.

Periyar’s warning was never abstract philosophy. He understood that once Hindutva gains a grip over the levers of justice, every shared space becomes a battleground, every act of administrative caution is dismissed as “appeasement,” and every assertion of federal or secular norms is painted as “hate for Hindus.” Thirupparankundram shows just how far down that road the system has already travelled.

For a country still stitching itself together from a patchwork of languages, faiths, castes, and histories, this moment is not trivial. India’s fabric holds strong only when its threads are not deliberately yanked apart by those who see division as opportunity and conflict as political capital. Over the last eleven years, this brand of politics — repackaging folklore as immutable dogma, weaponizing administrative processes, and using courts as battlegrounds for cultural revisionism — has grown more confident and more deeply embedded.

If every community in India were to mirror this cycle — digging up old wounds, demanding restoration for every imagined slight — it would not merely endanger peace. It would undermine the very meaning of independence, federalism, and progress.

In this context, Tamil Nadu’s response matters. The state is calling this capture by its name, defending the autonomy of the civil administration and the police, and insisting that courts remain constitutional courts — subject to scrutiny, transparency, and accountability. This stance is not merely about one hill, one lamp, or one festival. It is about preserving the principle that no ideological network, however entrenched, should be allowed to distort governance or destabilize coexistence.

Thirupparankundram is not just another front in the ongoing cultural battle.
It is a warning flare — illuminating how quickly harmony can be disrupted when institutions bend to ideological pressure.

How we respond now will determine whether Tamil Nadu’s legacy of coexistence becomes a model for India’s future, or a casualty of its present.

(Top image, PTI)

Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” — Politics, Movies, Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.