A conspiracy theory is not an exoneration: Karur's 41 dead need evidence, not excuses

Forty-one people are dead in Karur, and the ruling party's answer is a ghost story. Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam's petition to the Supreme Court, challenging the Madras High Court's Special Investigation Team, alleges the possibility of a "pre-planned conspiracy" by miscreants behind the September 27 stampede. Read that again: the party whose rally killed 41 people wants the country's highest court to consider that someone else planned it. Conspiracies are the cheapest form of crowd control. They convert an accountability question — who failed, and how — into a mystery story, where the villains are always conveniently unnamed and the investigation can never quite conclude. A government that suspects saboteurs behind every tragedy is a government that never has to answer for its own failures. And the failures in Karur are not mysterious at all. Twenty-seven thousand people were admitted into a venue permitted for 10,000. The chief guest arrived seven hours late, and the crowd waited in the heat without water. Hoardings and barricades blocked the escape routes. These are not whispers from the shadows; they are the plain, documented facts of September 27, acknowledged by the police's own reports. No conspiracy theory is required to explain how 27,000 people in a 10,000-person space, kept waiting for seven hours, can turn a rally ground into a death trap. Physics did that. Negligence did that. The High Court understood this. Justice N. Senthilkumar called the episode a "huge man-made disaster", said the party's functionaries had "fled the scene" and "abandoned" the victims, and criticised the party's "poor quality leadership". Uncomfortable words — which is precisely why TVK's petition objects to them. The party wants the Supreme Court to set aside not just the state-police SIT, but the judge's "unverified and prejudicial observations" as well. When power objects to the words used about it, pay attention: it is not the investigation it fears, it is the description. None of this means the state police are the ideal investigators. TVK's argument that a force whose impartiality even the High Court doubted should not probe alone is not frivolous. An independent inquiry is exactly what the dead deserve. But an independent inquiry asks who failed — it does not begin by floating the theory that the failure was someone else's sabotage. The order of operations matters: first the evidence, then the conclusions. TVK has reversed it. There is a deeper rot here that the Dravidian movement has warned about for a century: power that cannot bear scrutiny will always manufacture enemies to avoid it. Periyar taught that no authority — not the priest, not the landlord, not the party — stands above questioning. A ruling party that responds to 41 deaths by alleging conspiracy is practising the oldest trick of unaccountable power: change the subject. The families of Karur do not need a conspiracy theory. They need to know why their sons and daughters went to a political rally and came home in coffins. They need to know who decided that 27,000 people could fit where 10,000 were permitted, who decided the chief guest's schedule mattered more than the crowd's safety, and who will be held responsible. Evidence, not excuses. Answers, not ghosts.