By enforcing an undeclared bundh in Tamil Nadu over Sethusamudram issue, the DMK government has shown a lofty contempt for the judiciary.

Chief Minister M Karunanidhi cannot evade responsibility by saying that the leaders of the ruling DMK and its allies only resorted to a token hunger strike following the apex court order banning the bundh.

Mr Karunanidhi, who is the president of the ruling DMK as well as Chief Minister, has deliberately blurred the fine distinction between party and government and justly deserves the reprimand from the apex court.

Maybe the judges who heard the AIADMK’s special leave petition against the Madras High Court order, which did not stay the bundh but gave clear directions to the government to see that normal life was not affected, have shown lack of judicial restraint by observing that wilful disobedience of its order amounts to breakdown of constitutional machinery and warrants dismissal of the government.

But as the court has pointed out, the bundh call given by the DMK and its allies was violative of the judicial ban imposed in 1998. By not running buses, the government had ensured a near-total shutdown. Of course, government offices and government-run liquor shops were open and attendance was thin in the former and it was business as usual in the latter.

The DMK, the Congress and the PMK are part of the UPA government. To say that a bundh was necessary to make the Centre speed up the project is farcical as Union Shipping Minister T R Baalu of the DMK is in the committee which is to consider whether alternative alignments to save the Ram Sethu can be considered.

It is not as though only the AIADMK, the BJP and the Janata Party, which want the Ram Sethu safeguarded, are opposing the present alignment of the canal. Environmentalists and other experts have questioned the viability of the project itself and voiced concern over its likely harmful effect on the Gulf of Mannar marine biosphere.

Even those who share Mr Karunanidhi’s view that the project is a boon to Tamil Nadu need not necessarily believe that the bundh is the only way out. This is not the first time that the ban on bundhs has been violated in Tamil Nadu. But the farce has gone on long enough and it is time to cry a halt to it.