CHENNAI: There is no question of people from other states being a minority or majority in Tamil Nadu and seeking shelter in the state because they too are natives here and citizens of one nation, said governor R N Ravi.
He was speaking at the statehood day celebration of various states and Union territories at the Raj Bhavan in Chennai on Wednesday. Speakers from other states, who addressed the gathering ahead of him, said they were grateful to Tamil Nadu for giving them a shelter and a home. "I heard some friends, who spoke here, saying they were grateful to Tamil Nadu for giving them shelter. This I feel is very strange. There is nothing called a shelter. This is one nation," he said.
The governor said there were more than 15 million Telugu speaking people in Tamil Nadu, who never thought they were a linguistic minority here and instead considered Tamil Nadu their home. Similarly, there are more than four to five million Malayalees. There is no question of a minority or majority here, he said.
"We are all members of a family, like the petals of a rose. We are all one. But we seem to have gotten weaker when we started creating states, and people started developing an identity relating to their state," the governor said. "A state is a political and administrative structure, and we should leave it at that," he added.
"The cultural harmony and cultural continuum of Bharat is one. Pongal was not a festival celebrated only by Tamils. It is celebrated throughout the country. Ugadi is not celebrated by Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana alone. Onam is celebrated by Malayalis throughout the country. We may speak different languages, but we are all members of one family," he said.