Days after the police firing in Thoothukudi that left 13 people dead, questions are being raised in certain sections of the State bureaucracy as to whether the then Collector N. Venkatesh received the right guidance from senior officials in Chennai on handling the anti-Sterlite agitation.
Bureaucrats contended in private that Mr. Venkatesh might not have received proper directions from higher officials, as otherwise, the protests would not have been allowed to continue for 100 days.
One civil servant felt that Mr. Venkatesh, who had served in Nagercoil and Madurai in different capacities, would have gathered a fair idea of the complex communal and caste dimensions in the southern districts, as he was about to complete a year as the Collector in Thoothukudi. With some guidance from Chennai, he would have perhaps been able to handle the anti-Sterlite protests better, the official said.
When contacted, Mr. Venkatesh declined to comment.
‘Ban orders were defied’
Denying the suggestion that the then Collector and the government were not on the same page when it came to dealing with the situation, a senior government official pointed out that the agitation went off “peacefully all these days”, except on Tuesday last – the 100th day of the protest.
The official stuck to the government’s position that “some outsiders and radical elements with the motive of creating disturbances” were instrumental in changing the narrative of the protests. On that fateful day as well, the administration had expected that the protest would go off peacefully, as it had in the past. “Prohibitory orders were in place and the troublemakers had blatantly defied them,” the official reasoned.
The official reiterated that in the last three months, the district administration had made efforts to resolve the row over the Sterlite plant by holding “peace meetings” on several occasions with representatives of the protesters.
M.G. Devesahayam, former civil servant and a resident of Nagercoil, felt that an order of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on May 18 had compelled Mr. Venkatesh to invoke prohibitory orders (Section 144 of the CrPC — power to issue order in urgent cases of nuisance or apprehended danger) when the district administration was not “prepared.” Once the trouble broke out, the authorities resorted to “coercive steps.” Otherwise, the practice being adopted by the administration at the district level was to use Section 129 (1) [dispersal of assembly by use of civil force], under which those who sought to assemble unlawfully were taken into custody and let off later in the day, which was a “democratic way” of handling the participants of any agitation, he said.
