Former Thoothukudi District Collector N Venkatesh is among the 21 officers held responsible by the Aruna Jagadeesan Commission for the 2018 firing that killed 14 persons. The Justice Aruna Jagadeesan Commission of Inquiry’s report, tabled in the Tamil Nadu Assembly on Tuesday, October 18, called for legal action against the District Collector and three Tahsildars, along with 17 police personnel. The report found that Venkatesh did not take sufficient action to prevent the riot and thereby the police firing.
The report observed a “total lack of coordination between the District Administration and the police.” It added that guidelines mentioned in the Thoothukudi Riot Scheme (guidelines on police action during caste and communal riots in Thoothukudi) were not adhered to. The report said that the implementation of the Riot Scheme would have gone a long way in managing the riots effectively.
The commission’s report said that the then District Collector N Venkatesh did not attend the peace committee meeting for reasons “best known to him." It also questions why another peace committee meeting was not held under the supervision of Venkatesh after the first one presided over by MS Prasanth “ended in a fiasco”. The report said, “It was not as though there was an error of judgement in assessing the gravity of the situation and the view of this commission is that there is total inaction, lethargy, complacency and dereliction of duty on the part of the District Collector.”
The commission also recommended that action be taken against three special executive magistrates in Thoothukudi — Deputy Tahsildar of Election Sekar, Divisional Excise Officer Chandran and Zonal Deputy Tahsildar Kannan. “This commission opined that the aforesaid special executive magistrates had been planted in a jurisdiction to suit the version of the police,” the report said.
The report noted that there was no preventive arrest made on May 21 or 22, 2018. This would not have been a problem had there been no threat of breach of peace. It observes that when organisations like Makkal Adhigaram, Makkal Kalai Ilakkiya Panpattu Kazhagam and Youth Wing joined the protests, there emerged a chance that they would whip up passions and intensify protests. Authorities should have taken the cue from such gradual developments to come up with strategies to identify and detain “mischief mongers.'' That there were no efforts to curb such miscreants is “clearly a lapse on the part of the police compounded by a lethargy and indifference on the part of the District Administration.”
In 2018, residents of the coastal city of Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu had gathered peacefully to demand the shutting down of Sterlite Copper. The civil protest that went on for about 100 days ended in unprecedented violence and led to open firing by the police, which resulted in the death of 14 people, including that of 17-year-old Snowlin Jackson. The police fired on the protesters for two successive days on May 22 and 23, 2018. Over the two days, more than 100 people were injured. On May 22, eleven of the protesters died at the protest site, while 22-year-old Kaliyappan died the next day, when the police fired yet again. One more person succumbed to his injuries in October 2018, after undergoing prolonged treatment for his injuries.
Watch: Thoothukudi-Sterlite shooting: Top cops indicted in probe