CHENNAI: While Tihar is getting a share of Tamil Nadu leaders in connection with the allocation of airwaves, back home many of their colleagues in state politics are filling local prisons, accused of grabbing land.
Land appropriation has become such a disquieting social issue in the state that a senior police official told ET that it was perhaps the "most problematic aspect in managing the state's law-and-order".
Consolation, if any, for the political leadership of the state that witnesses the DMK and AIADMK ruling by turn in recent decades, is that leaders from both the Dravidian parties are facing allegations of usurping land.
Investigations into land-grab cases have so far proven a double-edged sword. After a number of DMK leaders went behind bars, an allegation has now been raised against AIADMK's minister for commercial taxes and registration, SS Krishnamurthy by one of his own party colleagues. The minister has denied the allegation, terming it "politically motivated".
The ongoing crackdown by the new AIADMK government has landed many leaders in prison, and about two dozen in the first fortnight of this month alone.
So much so that it would take a prison tour if any political leader were to visit all his colleagues arraigned in land-usurping cases. Union chemicals and fertilizer minister and DMK leader MK Azhagiri did just that on Wednesday, dropping by the Palayamkottai prison to meet his associates N Suresh Babu alias Pottu Suresh, G Thalapathi, Krishna Pandi and Kodi Chandrasekharan, and then hopping across to the Madurai Central Prison to call on S Mohammed Ibrahim, former chairman of the Kodaikkanal municipal council.
In Salem, a special cell on land grabbing named senior DMK leader and former agriculture minister Veerapandi S Arumugam along with a dozen others in a land-grabbing case. Arumugam has sought anticipatory bail.
Countering criticism from DMDK and others that a union minister should not have gone visiting "anti-social elements", Azhagiri said he was "visiting close friends". His father and former chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi said the Jayalalithaa government was "letting loose anarchy", and that the government appeared to bent on arresting DMK leaders with a view to separating them from their families and making them suffer. Karunanidhi said the government was targeting innocents under the guise of taking action under law.
The sheer power wielded by land sharks is evident by the fact that there are few who would go on record about the issue. Says an academic with a leading Chennai-based institution about land grabbing in Tamil Nadu: "There has been a steep increase in land prices, which tempts people to grab land. There are also issues like a number of aged couples living alone in the state and their children living abroad, and the existence of unattended plots. All of this makes for a recipe that attracts land sharks".
Land appropriation has become such a disquieting social issue in the state that a senior police official told ET that it was perhaps the "most problematic aspect in managing the state's law-and-order".
Consolation, if any, for the political leadership of the state that witnesses the DMK and AIADMK ruling by turn in recent decades, is that leaders from both the Dravidian parties are facing allegations of usurping land.
Investigations into land-grab cases have so far proven a double-edged sword. After a number of DMK leaders went behind bars, an allegation has now been raised against AIADMK's minister for commercial taxes and registration, SS Krishnamurthy by one of his own party colleagues. The minister has denied the allegation, terming it "politically motivated".
The ongoing crackdown by the new AIADMK government has landed many leaders in prison, and about two dozen in the first fortnight of this month alone.
So much so that it would take a prison tour if any political leader were to visit all his colleagues arraigned in land-usurping cases. Union chemicals and fertilizer minister and DMK leader MK Azhagiri did just that on Wednesday, dropping by the Palayamkottai prison to meet his associates N Suresh Babu alias Pottu Suresh, G Thalapathi, Krishna Pandi and Kodi Chandrasekharan, and then hopping across to the Madurai Central Prison to call on S Mohammed Ibrahim, former chairman of the Kodaikkanal municipal council.
In Salem, a special cell on land grabbing named senior DMK leader and former agriculture minister Veerapandi S Arumugam along with a dozen others in a land-grabbing case. Arumugam has sought anticipatory bail.
Countering criticism from DMDK and others that a union minister should not have gone visiting "anti-social elements", Azhagiri said he was "visiting close friends". His father and former chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi said the Jayalalithaa government was "letting loose anarchy", and that the government appeared to bent on arresting DMK leaders with a view to separating them from their families and making them suffer. Karunanidhi said the government was targeting innocents under the guise of taking action under law.
The sheer power wielded by land sharks is evident by the fact that there are few who would go on record about the issue. Says an academic with a leading Chennai-based institution about land grabbing in Tamil Nadu: "There has been a steep increase in land prices, which tempts people to grab land. There are also issues like a number of aged couples living alone in the state and their children living abroad, and the existence of unattended plots. All of this makes for a recipe that attracts land sharks".
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