DMK Mounts Statewide Agitation Over Women’s Safety
On Saturday, DMK workers across Tamil Nadu are taking to the streets for a statewide agitation built around one question: do women and children feel safe under the TVK-led government? The party, now in opposition, says the administration has failed to keep order and has not acted firmly on crimes against women and children. It alleges that some ruling-party functionaries have been involved in such crimes. Its women’s wing is part of the protest. These are the opposition’s claims, not findings, and so far the coverage points to no specific incidents, which is worth remembering before anyone treats the argument as settled.
A charge every government hears sooner or later
No matter how someone politically tilts, that's the charge that is filed, because a family determines a government by the normal weekdays: will a daughter be able to catch the last bus home, will a row at the police station be recorded or simply shrugged off. Leader of Opposition Udhayanidhi Stalin has challenged Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay to call for a law and order review and has made the case that killings still happen, despite regular meetings. A meeting is easy to promise. What people remember is whether anything changes afterwards, and that is as true for the opposition on the day it governs as it is for the party in power today. Citizens, especially women who have waited at a station counter for an officer to look up, tend to remember the difference.
What would actually settle the argument?
Protests can force attention, but as noted across insightful women empowerment articles, they cannot measure underlying progress on their own. The real issues for women's safety in Tamil Nadu are boring ones: how many complaints are filed, and on what timeline; how many result in charge sheets; how many go on to conviction; how long a woman has to wait before her call to a helpline is answered. These numbers are there, and the government as well as the opposition would do well to publish and make arguments about them instead of duelling over headlines. If those cases mentioned in a particular case are really those of ruling-party functionaries, then the test must be whether those go through the same mechanisms as anyone else, and whether the complainant is shielded from pressure.
Behind every number for crimes against women and children is a family that gave up on something: the police, the locality, the truism of reporting. Restoring that was what the riot rally covered; it's what the law-and-order narrative in Tamil Nadu is about after the banners are down and the cameras are turned away. For voters, there'll be another trial at a stage beyond the chaos - the post-rally reports, the data in the papers, and the silent cases that don't get splashed.
