BOMBAY/MADRAS, 12 July — Police in the southern state of Tamil Nadu yesterday arrested member of Parliament and central government ally M.K. Vaiko under a tough anti-terror law for supporting Sri Lanka’s Tamil separatist guerrillas.
“A police party arrested Vaiko as soon as he landed in the city by executing a non-bailable arrest warrant issued against him,” an official said.
Some 3,000 of Vaiko’s supporters in the state were rounded up ahead of the arrest, which took place immediately he stepped off a flight from Bombay.
Another 250 members of the MDMK party, which Vaiko heads, were detained when they tried to march on the airport at Madras to welcome him, police and witnesses said. A police official said Vaiko would be taken to “a facility some eight hours drive away”.
At the airport, Vaiko told reporters he would not be cowed down by the “fascist” Tamil Nadu government. “We will use people’s power to fight this fascist regime. We will not be cowed down by the repression unleashed by this regime,” Vaiko said.
He also appealed to his party cadres to keep calm and not to resort to violence.
“The MDMK protest against the arrests will be peaceful. We will do nothing to upset normal life,” said Vaiko.
Vaiko is a member of India’s national parliament and his MDMK party is a partner of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s ruling coalition government.
The Tamil Nadu government invoked the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) Tuesday in convincing a court to issue a non-bailable arrest warrant for Vaiko for making a speech in the state on June 29 supporting Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Vaiko told reporters in Bombay soon after his arrival from the United States that he would legally challenge the warrant issued against him.
He accused state Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha of using the anti-terrorism law to intimidate her political opponents.
“She is using POTA for political vendetta,” Vaiko said. The MDMK has been a staunch supporter of the LTTE, which has fought the Colombo government for three decades in a campaign that has left more than 60,000 people dead since the 1980s.
The LTTE was outlawed in India in May 1992 after the outfit was held responsible for killing former Premier Rajiv Gandhi.
Velupillai Prabhakaran, the chief of the LTTE, is cited as the main suspect in the 1991 assassination of Rajiv in Tamil Nadu, which is home to India’s 55 million Tamils.
Politics in the state is polarized between groups opposed to any support for the LTTE and parties campaigning for Delhi’s renewal of contacts with Prabhakaran’s de-facto administration in Jaffna. Analysts said the expected arrest of Vaiko posed a dilemma for the central government.
The MDMK leader, as a partner in the ruling coalition in Delhi, had supported the passage of the anti-terror law, which was approved by a joint session of Parliament on March 26. Now that the provisions of POTA have been invoked against Vaiko, Delhi can do little to rescue its ally as law and order is a subject that comes under the purview of the state rather than the federal government.
