DMK hits out at Governor again

Chennai: The DMK that has been hitting out at Governor R N Ravi, who too, on his part, has been consistently pointing fingers at the State government on various issues, has picked on the latest remark on the alleged delay in handing over the investigations relating to the blast in a car at Coimbatore to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday.

Giving a run down on five explosions in various parts of the country in the recent past, an editorial in DMK’s party organ, ‘Murasoli,’ compared the time taken for handing over the cases to the NIA and said that Chief Minister M K Stalin had handed over the Coimbatore case in just three days unlike the others that had taken three to four months.

Titled ‘Ena kurai kandar azhunar?’ (What lapse did the Governor find?), the editorial said that if the Governor were to nitpick on everything on the government, many questions could also be raised against the others and referred to the person killed in the car blast on October 23 being let off by the NIA earlier and not being watched over properly by the previous AIADMK government.

Among the list of explosions that the editorial mentioned to underline the delay in handing over the cases to the NIA were the Delhi court complex blast that happened on December 23, 2021, and entrusted with the NIA on January 13, 2022 and the Khejuri explosion in West Bengal on January 4, 2022, that went to the NIA only on January 25 after a delay of three weeks.

Another incident in West Bengal that occurred at Naihati on January 27 was handed over to the NIA on February 8 and the blast at Police Bazar in Shillong on January 30 was given to the NIA on March 3 while it took more than four months to hand over the investigation relating to the blast at an automobile workshop in Durtlang, Mizoram, the editorial said, objecting to the manner in which the Governor had questioned the State government’s action.

Terming the Governor’s allegation of delay in handing over to the NIA as a needless complaint, it said that as a former police officer he should have known where to raise what question. A select gathering of invitees at a private function organized to inaugurate a hostel at a yoga and naturopathy hospital was not the right place or forum to raise doubts on an issue like a bomb blast, it said.

Though the Governor had acknowledged the efficacy of the Tamil Nadu Police in dealing with such cases and the information that they had provided when he was in the Union Home Department, he had wanted to know why the delay in transferring the probe in the latest case as though it had taken one year or one month or one week to hand it over the NIA, it said.

Scathing editorials in the ‘Murasoli,’ responding to Ravi’s averments and actions that earn the ire of the government, have become a regular feature, offering the DMK an additional platform to critique the governor, a post the party has been opposed to since the days of its founder C N Annadurai who likened the gubernatorial position to the stubs of a goat, meaning that it served no purpose.  

By way of explaining that the DMK government had acted swiftly and not let anyone connected with the conspiracy behind the Coimbatore blast escape, the editorial also explained the various steps taken without any delay and efficient manner in which the police department had worked to book the suspects.