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As the crow flies, the distance between Fort St George (the seat of political power here) and the Madras Reporters' Guild is less than 1 km and even less from Island Grounds – three sites of feverish activity today.
At the first site – which houses the state legislative assembly, Chief Minister announced that he was requesting the Central Bureau of Investigation "to bring all those who were involved in the brutal attack on press freedom and the general public in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu and Madurai city in particular – to book."
The reason given by the octogenarian CM was simple. Too many from his family were the dramatis personae in the incidents that left three innocents dead, several injured and property worth several crores burnt to cinders along with the tattered freedom of the fourth estate.
Several journalists' organisations met at the Reporters' Guild – an old, ramshackle structure that exists within the Government Estate with all their members expressing their anger at the turn of events. Some of them said that the very unified solidarity was a victory, others demanded the immediate arrest of all the culprits including Karunanidhi's elder son MK Azhagiri, all his rowdies and those policemen who acted as agent provocateurs during the ghastly incidents on Wednesday 450 km south of here. Others praised the CM for demanding a CBI probe, while more said that the attack on a major media unit associated with the DMK showed that journalists performed their duties under the canopy of perpetual danger.
Even as all this was happening, N Ram, the editor-in-chief of The Hindu ducked out of the meeting briefly to instruct his colleagues to hide the copy of the "bogus FIR" filed by a police sub-inspector in Madurai so that it could be the newspaper's exclusive on Thursday. Realising that a few had seen him do it, he openly declared in the meeting meant to condemn the assault against journalists that he had to safeguard his paper's commercial interests.
Significantly, The Hindu and the Sun Network (which includes the multi-edition Dinakaran) are competitors. It was yet another case of the survival of the fittest.
Half a dozen women constables and a few special branch officers in plain clothes stood guard outside. One of them surreptitiously entered the compound and used his multi-purpose mobile phone to record the audio of the proceedings. The police didn't have much travelling to do. The CBCID headquarters was less than a stone's throw away.
At the Island Grounds, the DMK faithful were putting together a massive stage that will showcase the DMK patriarch's golden jubilee as a legislator. The eastern arterial thoroughfare connecting the Raj Bhavan and the secretariat which also touches the venue for a massive public meeting on Thursday to addressed by Congress and UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and other leading political heavyweights from New Delhi. Serial lights had begun to blink illuminating the black-red DMK flags and the massive posters featuring the visage of Karunanidhi in several postures.
The seemingly uninterested common public of the southern metropolis gathered at the Marina Beach a wee bit to the east to seek solace from the summer heat. For them, it will be yet another occasion of verbal diarrhoea – which they will be forced to witness personally or from the comfort of their homes because that is what the Sun Network – the company that has a stranglehold over airwaves in this part of the country will force them to see.
For the time being nobody amongst the common public in Chennai is worried about abstract things like press freedom, because journalists were hit in the past (two of them were killed by government sponsored goons in the past), they are at the wrong end of the stick now, and will remain so in future also.
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