Image showing an overhead water tank. For representational purposes.
Credit: iStock Photo
Chennai: In the last week of December 2022, faecal matter was found in an overhead tank in a Scheduled Caste (SC) colony in Vengaivayal village in Pudukkottai district, triggering a massive outrage in Tamil Nadu.
Two years later, the CB-CID wing of the Tamil Nadu Police on January 24 informed the Madras High Court that it has filed a chargesheet against three members of the Dalit community in connection with the crime.
The findings of the CB-CID is now at the centre of a raging row with allies and opponents of the ruling DMK expressing no-confidence in the police investigation and demanding a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to get to the bottom of the incident. The probe said the three police committed the crime out of personal vengeance.
The contention of political parties like the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), CPI (M), and BJP is that the investigation was “flawed” and there was no way that Dalits would have mixed faecal matter in the tank that supplies water to the colony.
VCK chief Thol Thirumavalavan suspected that the CB-CID “implicated” three Dalit residents of the same village to conclude investigation in the sensitive case, which has been an embarrassment to the DMK government with opposition parties seeking to know was this the social justice that the ruling party screams about.
TN BJP chief K Annamalai jumped onto the bandwagon on Saturday by declaring that his party will take forward a legal struggle in support of the people of Vengaivayal. “The people of Tamil Nadu no longer trust police under the DMK government. We want the investigations to be taken over by the CBI,” he added.
The incident had come to fore in December 2022 after the water used by people living in the country was found to have contained faecal matter during a test prompted by frequent illness among children. The CB-CID identified the accused as Murali Raja, Sudarshan, and Muthukrishnan.
Unfazed by the criticism, the Tamil Nadu government on Saturday backed the CB-CID probe saying police analysed data from 87 mobile phone towers comprising more than 1 lakh phone numbers and examined close to 400 witnesses before zeroing down on Murali Raja, who is the prime accused.
The government said the investigating team of the CB-CID examined about 397 witnesses, including the complainant and his relatives, besides analysing around 196 mobile numbers.
“The motive of the villagers of Vengaivayal and Eraiyur were listed out and enquired. Apart from this, extensive DNA analysis was done by taking biological samples from the villagers. It is also ascertained that the children who were treated were not affected due to the consumption of faecal contaminated water,” the CB-CID said.
The agency contends that Murali Raja dumped the faecal matter in the overhead tank after his father, Jeevanantham, was “insulted” during the grama sabha meeting on October 2, 2022 by Muthaiah, husband of the panchayat president, for not maintaining the tank properly.
CB-CID sleuths also subjected the mobile phones of all three accused and Muthaiah to analyses at the Tamil Nadu Forensic Science Laboratory (TNFSL). “Many deleted photos and voice conversations were recovered, which substantiated the incident,” the agency added.