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Two years ago, after the Kallakurichi hooch deaths, I wrote about how the Tamil Nadu government uses ten-lakh-rupee cheques as headline grease. If your tragedy makes enough noise on Twitter, the state opens its purse; if you die quietly on a dark road, you get nothing.
I thought ten lakhs for poison liquor was the peak of political absurdity.
I was wrong. I severely underestimated how far a government will go when it's trying to manage a media disaster involving a film star turned politician.
In Karur, forty-one people died in a stampede at a TVK rally. Forty-one lives crushed in a dusty ground because thirty thousand people tried to fit into a space built for ten thousand, all to catch a glimpse of Vijay blowing kisses from a modified bus. The cash payout reached thirty-two lakh rupees per deceased family (ten lakhs from the state government, twenty lakhs from TVK, and two lakhs from the Prime Minister's Relief Fund).
Thirty-two lakhs. But even that wasn't enough to quell the political panic.
In July, the Tamil Nadu government went ahead and issued appointment orders for government jobs to kin from thirty-two of those families.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Yesterday, thankfully, the Madras High Court stepped in and struck the whole damn order down.
The division bench held that handing out public employment as a special relief package outside constitutional recruitment frameworks violates Articles 14 and 16. The court noted what any sane person with a copy of the Constitution already knew: sympathy cannot replace legality, and public posts are not party favors to be thrown around whenever a government wants to quiet down a scandal.
I felt a genuine, rare wave of relief reading the judgment.
Think about what those job orders actually meant to anyone who doesn't live inside a political campaign headquarters.
Right now, across Tamil Nadu, hundreds of thousands of young men and women are sitting in hot, cramped single rooms in Triplicane, Chintadripet, and Gandhipuram. They eat two-rupee tea and fifty-rupee meals, studying twelve hours a day for the TNPSC Group 4 and Group 2 exams. They spend five, six years of their youth memorizing geography, Tamil grammar, and aptitude questions, praying for a single junior assistant post so their parents can stop taking loans for fertilizer.
And what did the government tell them?
It told them: If you want a public job in Tamil Nadu, don't bother studying for five years. Just go stand in a mob at an actor's political rally, get crushed in a stampede, and we'll hand your brother an appointment letter before the week is out.
The court warned that allowing such an exception would "open the floodgates." It's about time someone pointed at the gates.
In motor vehicle accidents, in firecracker factory explosions, in weaving shed fires, people die every month in Tamil Nadu due to state negligence and corporate safety failures. The state hands their families a standard ex-gratia cheque, usually between one and two lakhs, and moves on. Nobody offers them a permanent desk at the Taluk office. Nobody writes them into the state payroll.
Why were Karur rally deaths treated like an elite category of grief?
Because it was high-visibility. Because a film star's brand-new political machine was involved, the state government was terrified of being accused of heartlessness, and both sides competed in a grotesque bidding war of public funds and state resources to buy off the anger.
The High Court didn't deny the tragedy. The grief of those forty-one families in Karur is real, and the loss is permanent. But a government job is not an ex-gratia hamper. It is a public trust funded by taxpayers, governed by constitutional rules of equal opportunity.
When you turn public employment into an ad-hoc compensation tool for high-profile disasters, you aren't showing compassion. You are committing state-level theft against every unemployed kid who trusted the rules.
This court ruling needs to be the end of it. Stop the headline compensation. Stop the ad-hoc job giveaways. Build rule-based disaster relief and universal safety nets for every citizen, or get out of the way and let the law work.
The state treasury is not a political campaign fund, and public jobs are not blood money.
Image Credit: The Scales of Justice - geograph.org.uk - 650458.jpg via Wikimedia Commons