A section of the Congress in poll-bound Tamil Nadu is up in arms over a film on the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965 that has been distributed by a firm run by chief minister M.K. Stalin’s grandson.

Stalin’s DMK is the leading partner of the ruling alliance in the state that includes the Congress, which gives outside support to the government.

The historical fiction film Parasakthi, which released last week, has been accused by some Congressmen of maligning the party and its late leader Indira Gandhi with inaccurate depictions of the agitation. In 1965, scores of students were killed by police during the militant protests against the “imposition” of the three-language formula in Tamil Nadu under Congress governments at the state and in the Centre, paving the road for the DMK to come to power in 1967.

The Congress has not ruled the state since then.

Red Giant Movies, whose CEO is Stalin’s grandson Inban Udayanidhi, is the distributor of the film that has not done well at the box office.

On Monday, Tamil Nadu Youth Congress senior vice-president Arun Bhaskar issued a statement with a call to ban the film if the objectionable scenes were not removed. Some of the inaccuracies pointed out by Bhaskar are reproduced verbatim:

n In 1965, the Congress government never officially announced that post office forms must be filled only in Hindi across all states. This is a complete fabrication deliberately created to malign our party.... The film depicts a fictional scene in which (actor) Sivakarthikeyan meets the Iron Lady Indira Gandhi and thereafter portrays her as speaking in a villainous manner.

n At the end of the film, during the end credits, real photographs of our leaders — K. Kamaraj, Indira Gandhi and the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri — are shown, accompanied by an utterly baseless claim that the Congress party shot and killed more than 200 Tamil people in Pollachi.

Incidentally, Sivakarthikeyan — seen as a successor in Tamil stardom to actor-politician Vijay — attended a Pongal gathering at BJP deputy Union minister L. Murugan’s home here on Wednesday.

Last month, several Congress MPs spoke out against a tweet by party leader Praveen Chakravarty attacking the DMK government over the growing debt of the exchequer. Chakravarty had earlier met Vijay — who is competing for the same secular political space that the DMK alliance occupies.

A senior Congress leader told The Telegraph: “A section of leaders, mainly those who came to the party through the Youth Congress, are not in favour of continuing the alliance with the DMK. These include Tagore, Tamil Nadu in-charge Girish Chodankar and Chakravarty. The DMK was not in favour of giving Tagore and Chakravarty tickets during the Lok Sabha polls, or even sending the latter to the Rajya Sabha. However, Congress president (Mallikarjun Kharge) is in favour of the alliance. On his recent visit to TN, Rahul Gandhi showed no indication of breaking the alliance and even had a long engagement with DMK MP A. Raja.”

The DMK has played down the issue. Its minister S. Regupathy told reporters in Pudukottai on Wednesday: “The Congress that existed during the imposition of Hindi was different. The Congress that exists now is different.... This (film) will not have any effect within the coalition.”

The BJP used the film to target the alliance. Its former state president K. Annamalai told reporters in Chennai: “Watching the movie, people should know how the Congress was then and should not vote for the Congress-DMK combine now in an alliance.”