Krishnan is now in Tiruvannamalai to guide farmers and other people to organise themselves against the National Highway Authority of India’s 277 km long Chennai-Salem corridor passing through 159 villages
“Is there an undeclared emergency in Tamil Nadu?” ask All India Kisan Sabha leader Prof Vijoo Krishnan who inspired farmers to take a long march to Mumbai.
Prof Krishnan raises the doubt following the arrest of AIKS Tiruvannamalai district president TK Venkatesan and vice president S Balaraman for making arrangement for an indoor meet of the Joint Action Committee Meeting Against Chennai-Salem Greenfield Highway Project in Tiruvannamalai.
Krishnan is now in Tiruvannamalai to guide farmers and other people to organise themselves against the National Highway Authority of India’s 277 km long Chennai-Salem corridor passing through 159 villages.
“After killing 13 protestors (in the anti-Sterlite protest) in Thoothukudi, AIADMK government clamps down on protests against the eight-lane Chennai-Salem Greenfield Corridor project… Environmentalists, activists and farmers being arrested at random,” Krishnan tweeted.
To protest against the undeclared emergency in the state, the farmers of the five districts – Salem, Dharmapuri, Krishnagiri, Tiruvannamalai and Kancheepuram – through which the highway passes would hoist a black flag on June 26, the day when emergency was imposed in the country in 1975, Krishnan said, adding that on July 6, the farmers would burn the copies of the government order for the greenfield project.
The meeting venue was shifted from a private Mill at Vada Aandapattu to CPI (M) party office following the arrest of two AIKS office bearers and 22 others. Over 300 people from the affected districts took part in the meeting.
AIKS state general secretary P Shanmugham said out of the 24 persons detained by the police in Tiruvannamalai, about 10 of them were general public who were passing by the mill and have no connection with the protest. “Even when the emergency was imposed in the country, only the political party leaders and activists were arrested not the public. Now in Tamil Nadu, even the public are being arrested. There is an undeclared emergency in the state,” he said.
Meanwhile, DMK has announced a demonstration against the police clamping down on the protestors in Salem on June 23 while BJP leader and union minister of state Pon Radhakrishnan asked the state government to take stringent action against the protestors as the Naxal sympathisers have intruded into it.
Police are trying to intimidate the protesters through arrest said A Chandramohan, leader of Joint Action Committee Against Eight Lane Road project in Salem. “The police has adopted a strategy of the divide and rule by remanding the landless and the activists in the prison and letting out the landowners with a warning. This is a new strategy adopted by the police after the post-anti-Sterlite protest in Thoothukudi to quell the protests here,” said he told DNA.
S Raja, a farmer in Kuppanur Kattuvalavau village in Salem, who was detained and let out said that the police detained him and his brother along with six others from the village at early hours of June 9 for opposing the project.
“My brother gave an interview to a Tamil news channel against the highway project. So the police took us to the station and got an undertaking from us to not to instigate protest and let us out. Don’t the farmers have right to protest even if their livelihood is threatened?” said Raja. Of the eight people detained by the police in the village, only two persons Mariyappan and Muthukumar who are landless workers and cadres of the political party were remanded in prison and came out on bail on Tuesday.
DMK DEMO
DMK has announced a demonstration against the police clamping down on the protestors in Salem on June 23 while BJP leader and union minister of state Pon Radhakrishnan asked the state government to take stringent action against the protestors.
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