Tamil Nadu: AIADMK MLAs suspended from Assembly for a day following ruckus over hooch tragedy

Chennai: Persisting with their demand for a CBI probe into the Kallakurichi hooch tragedy, the AIADMK MLAs created a ruckus in the State Assembly on Tuesday, prompting the Speaker to suspend them for a day, and then rushed to the Raj Bhavan to present a memorandum to Governor R N Ravi, requesting him to appraise the President and the Union Home Ministry of the failure of the Constitutional machinery in the State.

Turning up in black shirts, for the third consecutive day, to the House, the members demanded the abandoning of the Question Hour that was on and sought a discussion on the hooch tragedy that has taken a toll of 62 lives. When Speaker M Appavu refused to oblige to their demand, they raised slogans demanding the resignation of Chief Minister M K Stalin and the CBI enquiry and caused a stir, plunging the House into pandemonium. The Speaker ordered their eviction and suspension.

Minister for Municipal Administration K N Nehru said that since the opposition party members were disrupting the House and violating the rules, they should be suspended for the rest of the session and not just for the day. However, Chief Minister M K Stalin rose to tell the Assembly that they need not be suspended for the entire session and the Speaker agreed to limit the suspension to the day’s proceedings alone.

After trooping out of the Assembly hall, the evicted member rushed to the Raj Bhavan to call on Governor R N Ravi, who put out a message on X, saying that a delegation led by the Leader of the Opposition Edappadi K Palaniswami met him and submitted a memorandum concerning the tragic deaths caused by illicit liquor consumption in Kallakurichi, calling for a CBI inquiry and describing it as a ‘continuing failure of the State Government.’

Emerging out of the meeting, Palaniswami told media persons that arrack had been sold very close to the police station in Kallakurichi and that some ruling party bigwigs were behind the illicit liquor trade. Challenging the Chief Minister to prove that the illicit trade had been going on since the rule of the AIADMK, he said their party MLA from Kallakurichi, Senthilkumar, had demanded a discussion in the House on the illicit liquor trade in March itself.

The present tragedy could have been averted if the House had taken up the matter raised by the MLA for discussion then, he said and added that CB-CID investigation would not bring out the truth. In the memorandum presented to the Governor, the AIADMK said that the DMK government failed to act despite knowing about the increase in illegal alcohol manufacturing units in the State.

Though the Kallakurichi AIADMK MLA has spoken to the SP about the trade, nothing was done to stop it, the memorandum said, pointing to the fact that most of the victims of the tragedy belonged to the Scheduled Castes, the class that ‘deserved more validation and protection.’

Alleging that no antidote for methanol poisoning was stocked in the hospitals to treated those affected by the tragedy, the memorandum said that the Assembly was not holding any discussion on the issue when the AIADMK members were present in the House and that the transferring of the case to CB-CID was an eyewash.

Calling the tragedy an absolute failure of the State government, it said that the Chief Minister and the Director General of Police had not visited Kallakurichi after it happened. During the AIADMK rule between 2011 and 2021, there were no hooch tragedies in the State as the sale of methanol was completely regulated and the police were vested with powers to prevent illegal movement of methanol.

AIADMK’s political ally, the DMDK, wanted a White Paper on the tragedy. DMDK president Premalatha Vijayakanth, who was at Kallakurichi, said that she would meet the Governor soon and also wanted a CBI probe.

Meanwhile, BJP State Vice President V Duraisamy, told the media at Namakkal that the party would file a case against DMK’s Organisation Secretary R S Bharati for wrongly criticizing BJP State President K Annamalai as one behind the tragedy. He also insisted on a CBI enquiry.