JOIN USPolice cane TN protesters
Even as thousands of others joined a state-wide DMK fast to protest Kerala’s move to decommission the reservoir and reduce its storage level to 120 feet.
In another charged-up day, thousands of angry farmers from Theni district bordering Kerala, attempted to march en masse into that State through the ‘cumbum medu’ route today in a bid to enforce a blockade, as against through the border check-post at Kumuli in the last two days.
Police sources in Theni told Deccan Herald over phone late on Monday evening that the increasingly restive crowd, which was also growing larger, was “driven back” by lathi-wielding Policemen to avert any untoward incident inside the Kerala boarder.
Several farmers sustained simple injuries in the process, but there was no major casualty, Police said. Some protestors pelted stones at the Police, while sporadic incidents of violence continued to be reported in Theni district. Shops downed shutters in some places and lawyers boycotted courts, while an effigy of the Kerala Chief Minister Oomen Chandy was burnt. Tapping into the discontent in the five Southern districts led by Theni, which directly depend on the water from the Mullai Periyar dam for their agriculture and drinking water needs, the opposition DMK organized a dawn-to-dusk fast across the State, demanding that Kerala implement the 2006 Supreme Court order to raise the water level in the dam up to 142 feet and to desist from any move to break the existing dam.
Reiterating that the concrete-reinforced Mullai Periyar dam was quite safe, Karunanidhi warned that “the people here will not take it lying down any conspiracy by Kerala to convert parts of Tamil Nadu into a desert.”