Rajnath Singh cancels Chennai visit upon Tamil Nadu BJP unit's request

Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will not attend the convocation ceremony organized by SRM University in Chennai after the Tamil Nadu BJP unit requested him not to attend the event. The Defence Minister had initially accepted the invitation to be the chief guest for the ceremony. The SRM management had decided to confer honorary doctorate in literature to veteran Tamil lyricist Vairamuthu.

Reason to not attend the ceremony

When the #Metoo movement was at its peak, singer and dubbing artist Chinmayi had called out Vairamuthu for making sexual advances on her during her initial days in the industry. However, Vairamuthu denied all the allegations against him. Before that, he had also written a controversial article regarding a Vaishnavite seer Aandal, which was fiercely opposed by BJP for hurting the religious sentiments, which continued for many days, followed by several protests. Due to these reasons, the state BJP unit requested defence minister Rajnath Singh to not attend the convocation of the university, where he was scheduled to confer the award to the controversial lyricist. There were also some reports a few days back that Vairamuthu had been dropped from veteran filmmaker Mani Ratnam’s dream project Ponniyin Selvan after several accusations against him as a part of the #MeToo movement.

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BJP spokesperson SG Suriya posted on Twitter on Thursday night that the Defence Minister will not attend the SRM event. However, the event will happen on December 28.

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