Talking about the ongoing tussle in the Nadigar Sangam, which has been the order of the day for well over a year now, Radhika Sarathkumar claimed that every decision made by the current office bearers of the Sangam has been taken out of spite and personal reasons. Speaking to Times of India, the actress said, “Anyone who is following this Nadigar Sangam issue clearly knows that it’s all because of personal rivalry with us; they still haven’t been able to prove anything based on facts. First, they said Sarath has cheated the sangam of crores, then they alleged that the amount is in lakhs, and now they say that he took some money, and then returned the same during his tenure. This is so childish… and it’s purely personal.”
She added, “Everyone here knows what’s troubling Vishal, and why he is angry with Sarath -and all of it is personal. And Karthi is angry because Sarath spoke about his father earlier, and he couldn’t accept that his father was wrong.”
Following the announcement that the membership of her husband Sarathkumar and brother Radha Ravi have been revoked, the actress went on a Twitter rant addressing many questions to actor Karthi, the current treasurer of the Sangam. Karthi has not replied to these questions yet, at least not on Twitter.
The actress said “I myself have questioned Karthi, and have tweeted to him, too. But they didn’t respond to even one question of mine, which is so silly. Also, I don’t know why they spent crores to organise a cricket match for a day. I have been part of CPL, and I know what and how much we must spend to organise a match. I will definitely question all this. If Karthi is not going to get back to me on all the questions I have raised, I am definitely going public, and will ask them to show every single voucher they have. I will call the press, and ask them to prove all the allegations against Sarath. This will happen soon. Even in the police report, it’s clearly written that all this is nothing, but personal vendetta.”
Radhika went on to question Karthi’s reasoning for revoking Sarathkumar’s membership. “Karthi says that Sarath wanted to become a lifelong trustee of the Sangam, and therefore, amended the Sangam’s rules, only to revoke them later, when his work was done. If so, even the legendary Sivaji Ganesan, when he was the head of the Sangam, had implemented a rule that only descendants of the sangam members can take over the reign of the Sangam’s trust, which was later revoked by actor SS Rajendran, when he was helming the Sangam. Will this now make Sivaji Ganesan a criminal?”
She stated that no actor has come up to support Sarathkumar in this time of crisis, even though the latter has helped out many actors when they had problems like release issues. “From Kamal Haasan to Vishal, he has always been there when they had issues be it during the release of their films, or something else. But now, no actor has come forward to support him, and this is really sad,” said Radhika.
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Nasser, the President of the Nadigar Sangam has refuted Radhika’s claims saying, “All these issues had cropped during the election time. But at the moment, all I would like to say is that we have looked into all the old documents, and are going by the law. We know questions will be raised against us, which is why before we take any decision, we think about the repercussions, not a 100, but a 1000 times. It is very critical and we don’t want to go wrong with anything. It is no longer a personal feud, it is related to almost 3000 odd members. So, today if the board takes a decision, all the 3000 members have a right to know what we are doing.”
Earlier in September, when Sarath Kumar and Radha Ravi were temporarily suspended from the Sangam, Radhika expressed her anger over the ‘unjustified suspension’. On her official Twitter account, Radhika labelled the suspension a ‘witch hunt’ and took Vishal and Karthi to task, asking them to ‘Grow up’.