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Does the Constitution hold sway in Tamil Nadu?

The average Indian politician is a superstitious creature. Giridhar Gomango even changed his surname to 'Gamang' on advice from a numerologist. I hope everyone remembers the former chief minister of Orissa who brought down the Vajpayee government in April 1999 while posing as a member of Parliament.

But let us not be hasty in condemning all palmists, astrologers and numerologists. As another chief minister has just proved, in Chennai, there might be something to all the mumbo-jumbo. We should not be aghast at all since we always knew there is a 'Lal' in the very heart of 'Jayalalitha'.

That is 'Lal' as in Devi Lal, Bansi Lal, and Bhajan Lal, the trinity of politicians who controlled Haryana politics for decades. Bhajan Lal would arrest Bansi Lal. Bansi Lal would see to it that Devi Lal would be in handcuffs. Devi Lal would complete the cycle by throwing Bhajan Lal into prison. And so it went...

We South Indians used to shake our heads at the folly of these North Indian politicians. The politics of vengeance, we told ourselves smugly, would never find a place in the warm and gentle South. Today, when the Pakistani newspaper Dawn puts Karunanidhi's arrest on its front page and television stations across the world show footage of an old man being pushed around, I can only bow my head in shame.

Please mark that I wrote 'an old man' in the sentence above. It is this which sticks in the craw, and which strikes us all as being vulgar, even uncivilized.

For argument's sake, accept that the former chief minister of Tamil Nadu and his son, Stalin, are somehow involved in a scam over the construction of flyovers in Chennai. This is all purely hypothetical since there is no evidence of any wrongdoing, leave alone that Stalin and his father were involved. (The construction firms involved are three of the best known in India -- the National Building Construction Company, Larsen & Toubro, and Gammon India.)

Let us also forget that the man being pushed around in that dramatic footage is a former chief minister. It is really quite irrelevant since the law is no respecter of persons.

The crux of the matter is that nobody, not even a beggar, should be pushed around. Nobody should be arrested with a posse breaking into a house at 2 o'clock in the morning. No state government should rudely carry off a Union minister as though he were a sack of potatoes as we saw the Chennai police treating Murasoli Maran.

I am afraid Jayalalitha has condemned herself out of her own mouth. In a sadly belated statement -- the chief minister prudently avoided a proper press conference -- she attempted a tardy justification of the events of Saturday morning. When the police arrived to arrest her in 1996, she said, she was at a 'puja' and asked them to wait. She did not, Jayalalitha continued, physically obstruct the policemen.

Pardon me if I am wrong, but 'puja' is rarely, if ever, offered at two in the morning! The chief minister's own statement suggests the police came at some point between dawn and dusk. It also seems that the law enforcement authorities were a lot more polite in Karunanidhi's day if they waited for her to complete her prayers rather than grab her by the neck.

The immediate comparison is to the infamous 'midnight knocks' of the Emergency. (With marvellously poor timing, Karunanidhi was arrested almost exactly 26 years after Indira Gandhi's declaration of dictatorship.) But I lived through that period, and let me tell you that the current Tamil Nadu ministry has outdone anything that happened in those years.

Tamil Nadu was a small haven of democracy during the first half of the Emergency. Karunanidhi was the chief minister up to 1976, and he did his best to keep Indira Gandhi's hounds at bay. It was only after his ministry was dismissed and President's rule imposed in the state that Tamil Nadu too felt the dictator's whip.

But never, even during the Emergency, were over 23,000 people arrested in a single day in a single state. (That is the administration's own figure, others put it at over 30,000.) Bansi Lal was known for his iron grip on Haryana between 1975 and 1977, but even he could never have pulled off something like that! There have been no arrests on this scale in the history of independent India, you have to go back all the way to the British Raj's handling of the 'Quit India' movement to find a parallel.

"Not a dog barked!" was a remark made by one arrogant British officer after Mahatma Gandhi was arrested. He was wrong, but the point was that after arresting several thousand people, India was left without a leader worth the name. Today, when Chennai's policemen smugly congratulate themselves on how peaceful the city is, I hear an eerie, and disturbing, echo...

Mark you, it is not just the arrests that are disturbing, but the manner in which they were conducted. Were there any warrants? Were all 23,000 detainees produced before a magistrate as the law demands?

Having copied Indira Gandhi in one matter -- mass arrests following a midnight knock -- Jayalalitha seems to be treading the same path vis-a-vis the media. About a hundred journalists have, I am told, been arrested. Sun TV has been ordered to stop showing footage of Karunanidhi's arrest. The Constitution may promise freedom of expression as a fundamental right, but does the Constitution hold sway in Tamil Nadu?

Let the last word go to the Supreme Court: "The quality of a nation's civilization," their lordships observed in 1994 in the Joginder Kumar case, "can be largely measured by the methods it uses in the enforcement of criminal law." You tell me: is the Tamil Nadu government civilized?

T V R Shenoy