In the ADMK election
manifesto for the Assembly elections in 2011 it was said, “Law and order will
be strictly established without any mercy. All steps will be taken for peaceful
living of people.... The unnecessary work load of the police will be reduced
and they will be made to give utmost importance to the safety and problems of
the people.”
After the ADMK’s electoral
victory, Jayalalitha held a press meeting on May 13 and said, “The first and
foremost priority of the new government will be to restore law and order and
fulfil all the promises made in the comprehensive election manifesto within a
time framework of one-and-half-years.” She did not stop there and claimed that
all ‘chain snatching goondas had taken heels to Andhra.”
After she lost power in
2006, the DMK assumed office, “This is the ruin has been wrought; the havoc
that has been wrought in Tamil Nadu is beyond description. Our priority is to
rebuild. Over the past five years, Tamil Nadu has been totally ruined. Time and
again this has happened. It is not an easy task to rebuild the entire state.”
She said an analogy, “Renovating a house normally involved giving it a coat of
painting and carrying out few repairs here and there. But, when the house itself
had been damaged and knocked down with debris strewn all around, it is no easy
task to restore it. First, the debris will have to be cleared for rebuilding
the house. It’s not an easy task.”
It was such a tall talk and
claim and the media carried out faithful reporting. A reader of one daily in
Tamil Nadu, Aswin posted the following comment in the daily’s website on May 14
last:
“While I
already knew what Jayalalitha had said to the press after the ADMK results were
announced, what I was unsure of then and even now, after reading this report,
is the credibility behind her claims of the situation in TN in 1991 and 2001
and her claims of having turned it around during her reign as CM. Frankly, the
analogy that Jayalalitha used, I felt were far-fetched and cheesy to say the
least, indicative only of the overbearing freedom obliged to her by the party’s
win. Only time will tell whether her words were mere filmy dialogues chosen to
feed the juice-hungry media. It would have been a little helpful if the report
had been more critical instead of merely reporting the facts like an ADMK
supporter, not that I am against the party. But going by what has happened in
the past, I only hold concern for the people of TN as to what this 3rd inning
is really going to bring to the people and the state!
The
informed reader’s only concern for the people of Tamil Nadu as to what this
third inning (of Jayalalitha) is really going to bring to the people and the
State. The answer is there for the people experiencing the agony and in the
reports in dailies and TV channels. There is not a day since the ADMK returned
to power in the state in May last when no thefts, robberies, burglaries,
murders, chain snatchings, kidnappings, misusing of children etc., are reported
in newspapers. Contrary to her averment after assuming office and in the
manifesto to ‘reduce the unnecessary workload of the police’ and deploying them
for giving ‘utmost importance to the safety and problems of the people’,
Jayalalitha pulled out a sizeable section of the police force and deployed them
on all sorts of unnecessary works like taking up civil disputes on land
ownership, in arresting her political rivals by foisting cases, lodging them in
distant jails in far away places and for every court appearances bring them
under heavy escort to their places and again returning to the jail. Moreover,
the police force is completely destabilized and demoralised from the top to the
lowest level due to frequent and whimsical transfers, resulting in total
breakdown of law and order and insecurity to the people.
As against
the tall claim of Jayalalitha soon after her swearing-in that chain-snatchers
had run away to Andhra Pradesh, even according to the admission of police a ‘gang
of high-flying chain snatchers was busted’ on Dec.13 last, as reported in
dailies as:
“They were
frequent flyers between New Delhi
and Chennai. Sonu (26) and Sanjeev (30) of Uttar Pradesh looked like elite
travellers who shuttled between the national capital and metros. Little would
anybody suspect that they were part of a notorious gang that flew to cities
across the country to snatch gold chains.
According
to police sources, a constable attached to the Valasaravakkam station signalled
two youths on a motorcycle to stop on Tuesday. When they ignored and sped past
him, the irked constable gave chase on the busy road and apprehended Sonu.
Handing him over to some locals, the constable continued the chase and
apprehended the motorcyclist Sanjeev.
Verification
of vehicle records showed that the motorcycle belonged to one of them. Though
the duo initially tried to mislead the police by giving false information,
interrogation by a team of officers brought out the shocking fact that they
belonged to a gang operating across the country.
“The modus
operandi of these youth was to take flights to Chennai and other major cities.
They would go around snatching gold chains and return to New Delhi by train. Unlike other culprits who
use stolen vehicles to commit chain-snatching offences, these persons bought
latest motorcycles. They wanted to avoid getting caught by the police during
routine vehicle checks,” a police officer said.
Preliminary
enquiries revealed that they were operating in Chennai from several months now.
“They were part of a five-member gang that came to the city once a fortnight.
We have the details of the other three suspects. The accused know little about
the city's topography…they would just go around and snatch gold chains.”
Investigation
revealed that the accused would park their motorcycles in the parking lot at
the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus (CMBT), Koyambedu. After checking into a
hotel in the locality, they would strike and return.”
Now police
say that the two incidents of daylight bank robberies were committed by robbers
from Bihar and the burglary in a jewellery mart in Tirupur in which gold and
diamond jewels worth Rs.14 crore were looted was committed by a gang from
Jharkhand and West Bengal and some of them might have sneaked into Bangladesh
with the jewellery which are yet to be recovered. So Tamil Nadu under ADMK
regime has turned into a haven for thieves, robbers and burglars from all other
states. It is also obvious that students and workers from Northern states who
are now staying in Tamil Nadu are not responsible for all these crimes as they
are living here for the past several years.
But to
divert the attention of people and to cover-up the ineptitude of the police
under ADMK regime, the police, at the behest of the regime has consciously
created a dangerous counter-productive, illegal and unconstitutional xenophobia
targeting lakhs of migrant workers and students from Northern states.
Unable to
make any headway in the two cases of daylight bank robberies in the suburbs of
Chennai, the police stage-managed an encounter in Velachery on the night of Feb
23 in which five suspected ‘robbers’ from North India were killed.
But
gunning down of five north Indians suspected to be bank robbers has turned out
to be the Tamil Nadu police's "Batla House". The National Human
Rights Commission has also decided to send a team to Chennai to probe the
gaping holes in the police's story.
After
Chandrika Rai, a truck driver from Bihar who was allegedly killed in the
Velachery encounter, emerged alive in Patna,
questions have been raised as to who the police gunned down in Chennai. Chandrika
claimed there was no one else by his name in his native Maujipur. But Chennai
police commissioner J.K. Tripathy insisted the encounter was
"genuine". The issue is turning out to be a tussle between Tamil Nadu
and Bihar with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar
speaking out against the "burglar slur" on the people of his state.
Four of the five youth killed were from Bihar, while one of them is believed to
be from West Bengal. Nitish has ordered his
state's chief secretary and the DGP to look into the issue and it is expected
that a fact-finding team from Bihar will visit
Chennai soon.
The Tamil
Nadu Police dispatched two teams to Bihar and West Bengal
to verify the identities of the men killed. The four other alleged burglars,
besides Chandrika, were Vinod Kumar, Harish Kumar, Vinay Kumar (all from Bihar)
and Abhay Kumar (from West Bengal), all aged between 30 and 35 years. Chandrika
wasn't the only weak link. Abhay's "landlord" Mohammed Aslam, from
Bengal's Howrah,
has also denied anyone by that name was his tenant. The family of Vinod Kumar
alias Sujay Kumar Ray has reportedly met the police and denied that he was
involved in the dacoity. They have claimed he was into real estate.
But the
police still believe Vinod was the kingpin of the alleged gang. It was his
image, captured on a CCTV camera, which helped nab the youth at the
single-bedroom flat of the state housing board at a lower middle-class locality
in Chennai. Neither does the place have any marks of a gun battle as claimed by
the police nor do the local residents corroborate the police version.
The
serious journalists’ fraternity that does not exist on
police-hand-out-substance-allowances and human rights’ groups feel the
Commissioner of Police J.K. Tripathy is lying.
* That
lawlessness is thriving in Tamil Nadu is something well known.
* Trying
to solve one set of lawlessness with another is akin to removing a speck of
dust in one’s eye with a red-hot iron rod.
Serious
journalists, human rights activists and senior counsels do not buy the police
version. They pointed out the lapses in the time-frames of the police story and
the claims of Tripathy. There are searching questions which remain unanswered:
*
Inhabitants in the neighbourhood of the crime scene were asked to keep
quiet and switch off the lights after the exchange of fire.
* Even during the alleged encounter, very few
neighbours heard fewer sounds of anything serious – and certainly not a deadly
encounter.
* The silence about the get away vehicle - a
red OMNI.
* The bullet scars were very few in the crime
scene and not commensurate with the deadly exchange of fire.
* One of the so-called killed persons spoke on
television identifying himself as Chandrika Ray of all places – somewhere in
northern India!
* The neighbours had heard the cops to keep off
and switch off lights at 10 p.m. Nevertheless, the neighbours did not hear
anything that resembled the sound of gunfire. “The sounds may have been like
ordinary disturbances in the neighbourhood,” a female resident said. It does
not coincide with the so-called time of the encounter.
Close on
the heels of daring bank robberies in Chennai, the hosiery town of Tirupur was
shaken by a major burglary at Anto Alukkas Jewellery shop in the early hours of
Feb.22. This was the second such incident in a year. Last September 24, an
armed gang barged into a branch of the Mini Muthootu Finance branch on the Tirupur-Kangayam Highway
and took away 1,381 sovereign of gold jewellery. The police arrested three
suspects in West Bengal and said the other
five suspects absconded. With police not recovering any loot and none of the
fingerprints of crime said to be matching with those of the three arrested,
doubts remain as to whether those arrested were really involved in the burglary
or whether the police had arrested them as a face-saving exercise.
The
Chennai city police has directed (Commissioner of Police issued order under
Sec.144 IPC) all house owners to file details of North Indian tenants with
their photographs with the nearest police stations on or before May 1, failing
which legal action will be taken against them under IPC Sec.188. But the xenophobia
seems to have been orchestrated by the ruling ADMK to cover up the Jayalalitha
regime’s ineptitude.
An ongoing
profiling of north Indian migrant workers and students by the Tamil Nadu Police
has sparked off a controversy, with activists calling it “racial” and demanding
an immediate halt. Civil rights activists, academicians and trade union leaders
called it an assault on citizens’ right to live and work anywhere in the
country. They held a protest in Chennai on March 9.
Geeta
Ramaseshan, an advocate who fights human rights cases in the Madras High Court,
said north Indians were ending up as victims of a brewing hate campaign in the
state. She cited the February 27 lynching of a mentally challenged person from
Andhra Pradesh in south Chennai as an example. The victim was mistaken for a
north Indian burglar. Police allegedly let the attackers go free. The lynching
came four days after five persons from Bihar and West
Bengal — suspects in two bank robberies — were shot dead by police
in the same area. A. Soundararajan, a leader of the Centre of Indian Trade
Unions (CITU), said one person from Bihar died after being attacked by iron rods
in Coimbatore.
He said the real issues were being overlooked. “There are 10 lakh migrant
workers in Chennai, Hosur, Tiruppur and other towns. They are virtually the new
class of bonded labour as they are denied minimum wages, injury compensation,
medical attention and decent living conditions. Asking them to enrol like
cattle in police stations is against all norms.”
Dwelling on the lack of protection for
migrants in the state, Professor A Marx of People’s Union
for Human Rights (PUHR) said, “Most of the 10 lakh migrant workers in Tamil
Nadu do not have the protection guaranteed under the Inter-State Migrant
Workmen’s Act. They are paid minimum wages and forced to work for long hours in
inhuman conditions with no recourse to legal protection in the event of
accidents. The police do not investigate deaths of migrant workers due to
violations.” While activists do not oppose gathering of such data, they stress
that this task should not be entrusted to the police. “This is a job for the
labour department,” said Madhumita Dutta, convener for Campaign for Justice and
Peace. “Speedily register them under the migrant workers act and accord them
the protection they need.”
People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL)
regional secretary S Balamurugan stated a few
days ago, “No law in the country permits such a data base. Police are targeting
poor migrant workers and inciting hatred among residents against outsiders.”
The groups are considering sending a memorandum to the state government in this
regard and if enumeration still continues, a PIL will be filed against it in
the high court, they said.
Laying the
blame for the recent mob violence on a mentally challenged person of Andhra
Pradesh in Pallikaranai and the killing of a 19-year-old Bihari boy in Pollachi
on the vitiated atmosphere created by the police campaign, the activists said
that persisting with such enumeration could lead to a situation that the police
may find it difficult to contain.
Police
have visited the houses of migrant workers and collected their details. The
workers are so scared that they don't go out after 6 p.m. Whenever they go out
in the night, they say police intercept and interrogate them. In some cases,
migrant workers claimed that they were taken to the police station for
questioning.
In a
separate development, two migrant workers belonging to a northern State were
allegedly attacked by some local people at Thiruporur in Kancheepuram district
on Feb.15.
According
to T.K. Elumalai of Rural Development Trust, an NGO, the workers employed in a
construction firm along Old
Mahabalipuram Road were walking to a shop when
some youth stopped them and asked for their identity.
“Unable to
reply in Tamil, they ran into the workers' colony. The youth raised an alarm
that the two were thieves which attracted the attention of others in the area.
A large number of people armed with clubs entered the colony and attacked the
workers. The two workers were injured and taken to a private hospital.”
The
enumeration is racist and targeted at a particular class — poorly paid migrant
workers who come to eke out a living thousands of miles away from home.
Already, the workers are grossly underpaid and overworked and forced to live in
harsh conditions by their contractors. Now, the police are infusing fear into
their minds by seeking personal details from them.
The
exercise, the hallmark of divisive politics practised by parties such as Raj
Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, whose activists have been accused of
harassing north Indian migrants in Mumbai. “The effects will not be without
ripple effect on the local economy and will diminish the state’s value as an
investment destination.
Following
PIL filed in the Madras High Court challenging the recent killings in an
encounter, two applications filed in the Madras High Court by six ADMK advocates
and residents of Velachery, the neighbourhood where the ‘encounter' took place,
describes these ‘north Indians' as “the workers who had landed in Tamil Nadu
for working, slowly steadied their roots here and later started indulging in
many crimes, many of which are dastardly and grave ones”. They further state
that “offences committed by (the) north Indians in Tamil Nadu are on the rise”
and that in this particular instance “group of north Indians were on a
rampage....disturbing the peace and tranquillity of the state”. The
applications have been filed to counter the ongoing public interest litigation
in the Madras High Court challenging the recent killings. In their malicious
and mischievous intent, there is one thing that the applicants have said that
is true, that they are ‘workers'. But the truth stops there. Tamil Nadu has a
fairly large interstate migrant population, estimated to be over ten lakhs,
with large concentrations around Chennai, Coimbatore,
Trichy, Madurai,
Hosur, Tirupur, Kanyakumari and Tirunelvelli. Hailing from Assam, Bihar,
Orissa, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and even Nepal, these men come to work on private
and government construction sites, in small engineering ancillary units, steel
rolling mills, lathes, hosieries, foundries, in roadside eateries as well as
fancy city restaurants, as security guards and even as farmhands.
But there
is another crucial difference that makes the inter-state migrant workers far
more vulnerable—the terms and conditions under which an interstate migrant
worker consents to labour. Most of the migrant workers in the State land up
through informal arrangements orchestrated by multiple contractors and
sub-contractors. Munniraj, a labour contractor in Hosur, has 650 Bihari workers
whom he supplies to the various small-scale engineering units in the industrial
area. The workers, who earn anywhere between Rs.3,500-Rs.4,000 per month, give
him 10 per cent of their wages, which works out roughly to Rs.2 lakh a month.
About 30,000 migrant workers from Bihar, Bengal, Orissa and Nepal work in
the area. Ruing that local workers don't want to work in the factories and
prefer MNREGA work, Sampat, an office bearer of Hosur Small and Tiny Industries
Association said “these migrant workers have become indispensable for
continuing production”. A short documentary titled Finger made by Progressive
Writer's Forum explains why the locals would rather work in MNREGA and not in
these factories. The film shows the dangerous working conditions in the
factories where accidents are commonplace, with workers losing their fingers in
pressing machines as a matter of routine. Apart from some medical treatment,
not much is given by way of compensation to the worker.
“We don't
get any money for injuries at work, we pay ourselves. Almost every day I injure
my hand in the machine, so many workers get injured”, said 21-year-old Manas
from Gaya district who has been working for the past six months in a factory
that makes casings for water pumps in Perungudi, OMR. “Almost all the workers
in my factory are from Assam
and Bihar,” added Manas, who works 12 hours a
day for six days a week for a wage of Rs.6,000 per month. His 19-year-old
roommate chips in: “I came to work last year in another factory, but the work
was so hard, lifting heavy loads 12 hours a day, I fell very sick and left”.
“I left my
job in a food company in Delhi
three months back and came here. They used to make me work for 16 hours a day
and paid Rs.5,000. Here I have better pay for less number of hours of work. But
I don't want to stay here. I feel insecure. Police has made our lives
miserable,” said Nandlal from Gaya
who sends his family of six Rs.4,000 every month. As if waiting for a cue,
Manas, who had so far not said anything about the police harassment, said: “I
am too scared to step out of the house after seven p.m., the police patrol
stops us and asks for ID proof, and if you don't have one you are taken to the
police station for enquiry”. After the bank robbery last month, police have
been visiting the slums where large migrant populations live and asking the
‘north Indians' to show their IDs or proof of employment. “Where will these
migrant people get any proof of employment or any ID for that matter?” asked
Geeta Ramakrishnan of Unorganised Workers' Union,
“the definition of interstate migrant workers in the Inter-State Migrant
Workmen Act itself is problematic”. It recognises only those workers who have
been “recruited by or through a contractor in one state under an agreement for
employment in an establishment in another state”.
In reality
this would translate to most of these workers not being covered under the Act.
So no questions of rights, like wages, displacement allowance, conditions of
work and employment, as provisioned under the Act will apply to them. Even the
2010 Supreme Court judgment asking for registration of all construction workers
in the welfare board is difficult to implement in Tamil Nadu due to two
Government Orders which require the workers to be verified by the local Village
Administrative Officer. “No VAOs ever verifies a migrant construction worker,”
informed Ms Ramakrishnan. In 2009, after rapes of two children of migrant
workers, a State-level policy was drafted to safeguard the children of migrant
workers. But it's been gathering dust since.
The
interstate migrant is a much-reviled figure, often unjustly so. Ghettoised and
insecure, and lacking any legal or social protection, the interstate migrant
workers become easy targets for the state, administration, overzealous nationalist
forces and, more worrisome, the local working class.
The
ongoing hate campaign and xenophobia created by the ADMK regime in order to
cover up its ineptitude and failure to protect people of Tamil Nadu from
crimes, reminisces similar vicious hate campaign and attacks on South Indians,
particularly Tamils in Mumbai (then Bombay) and elsewhere in Maharashtra by
notorious Shiv Sena in late 1960s after it was founded by Bal Thackeray in 1966.
The Shiv Sena also blamed South Indians for all the crimes in Bombay
just because the dons, smugglers like Haji Mastan and Varadaraja Mudaliar alias
Vardhabhai originated from Tamil Nadu, but their aim was to drive out all
migrant workers from South India. The move
also brings the painful memories of British rule days, when a community in
Southern districts was branded as ‘crime hereditary successors’ (F‰w¥ gu«giuæd®) the cruelties inflicted on their
menfolk and the struggles against such a system.
Is the
ADMK regime taking Tamil Nadu back to those dark days?
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