Rahamaan Sherif

Justice N. Ramesh of #MadrasHighCourt has expressed strong disapproval of the manner in which MIDS Associate Professor A. Kalaiyarasan was picked up by the police from his residence in the early hours on the basis of a fake Instagram post. Though a Minister had acknowledged the lapse and the Chief Minister had met the victim in person, the judge said: “The grace shown at the end does not answer the questions being raised: On what verification were plainclothes officers sent to a citizen’s doorstep at dawn over a social media comment? And what action has followed against those who so acted?” He went on to state: “An apology, however high its source, is not accountability, and a remedy that depends on the Chief Minister’s personal intervention is not a remedy at all. Secondly, that gentleman’s eminence secured his release within hours and an audience at the Secretariat; a common citizen with no access to power, taken at dawn on the same mistaken complaint, would have tasted the lock-up, the remand and the long road of a trial before anyone asked whether the account was even his.” The judge also wrote: “The measure of a police force is not how it treats the eminent when the press is watching, but how it treats the unknown when nobody is watching. It is against that measure that the handling of political speech—this case included—falls to be judged.” @THChennai @the_hindu thehindu.com/news/national/t…