2,000 cops on a holiday road: Vijay's Coimbatore convoy turns a campaign trip into a city shutdown

Coimbatore, Oct 3 — Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay will land in Coimbatore on Sunday and travel to Dharapuram for another round of campaigning ahead of the October 6 Assembly by-elections, and the state police are rolling out a bandobast of festival proportions for what is, on paper, a party event. According to an IANS report on Friday, around 2,000 police personnel will be deployed along the chief minister's route, with large crowds expected as the convoy passes through some of Coimbatore's busiest neighbourhoods on a holiday. Officials acknowledge that parts of the chosen route are narrow, and traffic on a Sunday is expected to crawl. What has raised eyebrows is the route itself. Vehicles leaving the Coimbatore airport for Dharapuram normally travel through Goldwins, Chinniampalayam and Neelambur to reach Avinashi Road. For Sunday's visit, the convoy has instead been routed through Chitra, Kamarajapuram, Singanallur and Ondipudur — prominent, densely populated city neighbourhoods — before joining the bypass road towards Dharapuram. The choice maximises visibility. It also maximises disruption. The deployment lands two days before campaigning ends on October 4. Polling in Madurantakam and Dharapuram is on October 6, with counting on October 9. Forty-nine candidates remain in the fray — 27 in Madurantakam, 22 in Dharapuram — and the TVK's candidates in both seats, P. Sathyabama and K. Maragatham Kumaravel, are AIADMK defectors whose resignations necessitated the bypolls in the first place. There is nothing illegal about a chief minister receiving security. But there is a difference between protecting a chief minister and staging him. Two thousand police personnel is not a security detail; it is a show of strength, and every constable posted on bandobast duty along the convoy route is one pulled away from law-and-order work in the districts. On a Sunday, when families are out and commercial areas are at their busiest, Coimbatore's residents will pay for the spectacle in hours lost to barricades and diversions. The pattern is familiar. In the eighteen months of TVK rule, governance has repeatedly taken the form of the event: the roadshow, the rally, the inspection that photographs well. The Left's charge this week — that TVK tops the charts in cash distribution for these very bypolls — hangs over the campaign. Sunday's 2,000-strong bandobast is the other side of the same coin: a government that campaigns with the full weight of the state behind it, and calls it governance.