It happened that night

ON a Doordarshan programme last week, the anchor asked the studio audience, comprising over a hundred of the best and the brightest of Delhi’s college-going youngsters, how many approved of the goings-on in Tamil Nadu and how many disapproved. Every single hand went up in disapproval.

I then asked the anchor to please put another question to the audience: how many had read the press statement released by the Tamil Nadu chief minister on the evening of Karunanidhi’s arrest? Not one had read it. Most had not seen and none had assessed the visual evidence put out by the Tamil Nadu police of exactly the same events.

The fault lay not in the police having manufactured their footage but only in their having got it out several hours after Sun TV had captured country-wide attention. The graphic Sun footage was endlessly telecast with little attempt to stress or even say that it originated with a channel owned by the family being arrested.

The demonisation of Jayalalitha did not originate on the last day of last month but goes back many years. I too made my contribution to the process, getting a defamation suit slapped on me by her which fell by the wayside only because she fell from power. I was certain the evidence against her would prove so overwhelming that justice would see her in jail years before she got the opportunity of contesting another election. Then I watched the Karunanidhi government relentlessly pursue her over the next five long years. Not only was she picked up and bunged into judicial custody, almost all her ministerial colleagues were picked up, arrested, held without bail in captivity for months on end, bullied and badgered, harried and harassed. Only four of them escaped the gentle attentions of Karunanidhi and his minions. As many as 96 civil servants and police officers were proceeded against. They included both her chief secretaries.

All this was extremely well covered by Tamil Nadu’s unmatched multiplicity of satellite channels. Moreover, with almost the highest level of literacy in the country, the percentage of the general public reading newspapers and magazines in Tamil Nadu is just about the highest in the land. There is, therefore, nothing the DMK government did against Jayalalitha and her colleagues that failed to reach every corner of the state. Yet, in the end, the people of Tamil Nadu decided by 196 seats to 38 that they wanted Karunanidhi out and Amma back. That is the bottom line.

And it is outrage over this bottom line that accounts for the complete lack of responsibility in media coverage which has characterised much of the goings-on in the media over that weekend. Balance is now being restored but only after the media has substantially discredited itself for its lack of professionalism in its avid surrender to sensation. Now those who care have seen Karunanidhi emerging from his bedroom, beaming from ear to ear, immaculately dressed in virgin white, all of three hours after he was courteously informed he was to be taken to a magistrate for remand proceedings.

Everyone also knows that trouble began only after Central minister Murasoli Maran arrived. Everyone has seen Maran repeatedly punching DIG Mohammed Ali in the face. Everyone now knows that Mayor Stalin fled his house, posting T.R. Baalu at the gates. Everyone has seen Baalu physically manhandling the posse of police, obstructing them shamelessly in the discharge of their duties and repeatedly telling them that he is a Central minister — as if they did not know and as if that is the passport to bashing up petty constables and inspectors. Everyone has also seen, once these obstreperous Central ministers were out of the way, the former chief minister being most solicitously escorted to his seat in the magistrate’s office. And everyone now knows that Maran was picked up because he insisted on sitting in the police car taking his uncle to justice and had to be physically removed because he was in gross violation of the law.

It is also now seeping into public knowledge that orders to arrest public personages (except ladies) only at night so as to avoid public disturbances were issued and implemented during Karunanidhi’s four terms as chief minister; that numerous dignitaries were so arrested; that the rationale for this was to avoid that breakdown in law and order which the NDA gang began fomenting when they found that the people of Tamil Nadu were reacting with a bored sense of deja vu to the unpleasantnesses of the night. It is also now getting known that Karunanidhi and Stalin were arrested on a detailed, well-documented complaint of corruption lodged with the governor by non-AIADMK corporators, on which the Karunanidhi government had taken no action; and that the arrests of the Central ministers were not on charges of corruption but criminal obstruction. Should all this not have been brought into the open when on Saturday and Sunday the media were into re-run after re-run of the Sun TV footage?

People now know what they were not informed on the Black Weekend: that the same Central government which acted so viciously against Governor Fatima Beevi has appointed as governor of Uttaranchal the same S.S. Barnala who as governor of Tamil Nadu in 1990-91 failed to report to the president the leakage of information to LTTE operatives of paramilitary action being planned against them by the Central government — and then refused to file an honest and straightforward report on foreign subversives backed by the state government of M. Karunanidhi who had allowed the assassins of 13 EPRLF refugees to escape the police net, assassins who then returned to Tamil Nadu to kill Rajiv Gandhi.

It is also now getting known — but was not then known because the media made no mention of it — that Karunanidhi had to be arrested to be interrogated because his past behaviour shows he does not voluntarily submit himself to interrogation. That is why the CBI-SIT failed to interrogate him, leading Justice Jain to observe that if only they had done so the entire conspiracy behind the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi would have been unravelled. Home Minister Advani accepted this observation and through the Action Taken Report of August 1998 assured Parliament that the CBI-MDMA would interrogate Karunanidhi.

Three years have passed but Karunanidhi has not yet let the CBI-MDMA question him. It would, therefore, have been utterly irresponsible on Jayalalitha’s part to have gently asked him to chat to the Tamil Nadu police about how he let his son, the mayor of Chennai, place an order for crores of rupees, through a contract which it was beyond the mayor’s powers to sanction, to a firm whose subsidiary had acted as consultants to the project, and for crores more than the lowest bidder.

That, and not the side issue of whether Karunanidhi should have been arrested in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, is the moot issue.

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