30 March 2013, 07:34 PM IST
I didn't make that up.
Dr Karunanidhi, a 70-year-old physician in Chennai was arrested on Thursday and kept in prison overnight. The charge: Causing hurt to a public servant. What he did: Asking a police sub-inspector accompanying Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa, who was visiting a patient in Apollo Specialty Hospitals, to remove his shoes before entering the intensive care unit.
That's quite a daring thing to do, since Asaithambi, the sub-inspector, was accompanying a VVIP none less than Jayalalithaa. How could a septuagenarian doctor ask him to remove the footwear which is an integral part of his uniform? What if the officer carries a few million pathogens to the ICU endangering the lives of several patients, he was escorting the chief minister, don't you know? This is Tamil Nadu, you see.
While many papers played down the story or ignored it altogether, TOI reported it on Friday and frontpaged a follow-up on Saturday, catalysing a flurry of protests from doctors and politicians. DMK leader M Karunanidhi, his tongue firmly in cheek, wondered if the doctor was punished because his name was also Karunanidhi.
Sending a 70-year-old man to jail – even if he had done the unlikely act of 'causing hurt to a public servant – is questionable legally and outright ridiculous by common sense. If that spoke volumes about misuse of power, the silence that followed the arrest (till TOI published the stories on Saturday) signified a nauseating sense of subservience. The doctor was understandably too shocked to react, and his family was scared of further victimisation. Even his neighbours refused to talk. The usually vociferous guardian angels of civil liberties and human rights did not notice it.
Police have this inane ability to be arrogant while escorting important people. One can understand their sense of duty to ensure the safety of the person they guard, but that doesn't entitle them to treat citizens like dirt. This attitude is representative of a deeper malaise that gnaws at the roots of self respect in a land where the self respect movement of Periyar Ramaswamy spawned the powerful Dravidian parties of today.
The powers that be in Tamil Nadu have repeatedly dressed up vindictiveness as a virtue, but if the king is naked, he deserves to be told that. I know that anyone can be sent to jail for at least a day if someone powerful doesn't like something—like this blog.
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