Tamil Nadu's aggressive police

THE WORST FEARS of violence and blood-letting on the occasion of the DMK's anti-police rally in Chennai on Sunday have indeed come true, and regrettably so. That the police should have opened fire on the processionists, whatever be the provocation, and brutally attacked media personnel covering the event reflects a new level of brazenness, considering that the rally itself was to protest against the atrocities they had committed on that fateful June 29/30 night while taking the former Chief Minister, Mr. M. Karunanidhi, into custody in the ``mini-flyover scam''. Given the sensitivity of the issue sought to be focussed and the persisting standoff between the law enforcers and the DMK, there was obviously a strong element of confrontation - and provocation - built into the rally. Whereas the occasion demanded utmost restraint on the part of the police at least to prove their detractors wrong, they reacted rather recklessly with yet another display of highhandedness and, at the end of the day, at least five persons had lost their lives - all DMK volunteers - and scores of others had sustained injuries; among them were several journalists, including a photographer of this newspaper.

Two distinct aspects of the rally-related events stand out insofar as they concerned the conduct of the police. First is the way the procession was managed along its 10-kilometre route. If the eruption of violence fitted into what has emerged as a pattern of sorts - it involved the tail-enders and broke out after dusk fall and in the vicinity of Gandhi statue on the Marina - the fact that gangs of hoodlums from the nearby slums could mingle with the rallyists and attack people indiscriminately with deadly weapons raises some disturbing questions about the political complexion of those anti-social elements and also about the status of the security arrangement the police had made at the potentially vulnerable spot. And this despite the unprecedentedly heavy deployment of the force from different parts of the State. The second and much more disturbing aspect is what is emerging as a pattern of vicious targeting of the media by the police, particularly the photo/video journalists, with the crew of a couple of TV news channels (obviously perceived by them as ``unfriendly'') being singled out for ``special treatment''. To the extent those from the visual media were put out of commission due to physical attacks or damage to their equipment, the ugly deeds of the police had been effectively prevented from being exposed to public view, even if partly. The total picture that emerges from the happenings on Sunday clearly features the distinctive hues of a ``Police Raj'' and will unnecessarily in its own way provide dangerous space to the Atal Behari Vajpayee regime to push ahead with its cynical manoeuvres seriously impinging on the federal character of Centre-State relations, as instanced by its decision to requisition the services of three senior IPS officers borne on the Tamil Nadu cadre.

In a sense, the police targeting of the media is reflective of - and perhaps draws inspiration from - the Chief Minister, Ms. Jayalalithaa's own totally negative and rather contemptuous attitude towards it. Apart from virtually blocking almost all the legitimate and conventional channels of information - ministerial as well as bureaucratic - available to the media, except of course for whatever she would like to dish out, the AIADMK supremo has been utterly intolerant of criticism, her protestations notwithstanding. It is bad enough that Ms. Jayalalithaa, seized as she is by an all consuming urge to ``fix'' her bete noire, Mr. Karunanidhi, and his close associates and driven by an unseemly hurry to realise her ``ambition'' in the shortest time possible, has been spending all her energies and those of her Government on that single-point agenda. But worse, reprehensible and something that strikes at the root of basic democratic freedoms - and may well prove to be disastrous to her Government itself - is the penchant Ms. Jayalalithaa has shown for dragging the Fourth Estate and its members into the quagmire of her no-holds-barred politics of vendetta vis-a-vis her arch rival.

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