Opinion: Arrest the nurses, darken the streets — this is TVK governance in one week

There is a photograph every new government eventually takes of itself, usually by accident. This week the TVK government posed for it three times. Nurses invited to talks came back detained. Two construction workers in Nanganallur and Ambattur died of electrocution where iron rods met live overhead wires. And on Wednesday, while Chennai read its power-cut lists — Tambaram, Chromepet, Medavakkam, Tiruvanmiyur, Porur, nine to two — the city learned the difference between a maintenance schedule and a governing philosophy.

Let us be fair about the power cuts first, because fairness is what the nurses were asking for. Planned maintenance is not a scandal. Every grid needs it. But a five-hour daytime shutdown across the southern and western corridors, landing in the same week as fatal worksite electrocutions, is not bad luck. It is a pattern of how the state treats the people who carry current, water and patients on their backs: as inputs to be switched off, detained, or mourned in a single paragraph.

The nurses' case is the clearest because it involves a promise. Before power, TVK stood with contract health workers who earn around Rs 21,000 and asked for permanence, equal pay and the incentives they were owed. After power, it offered them the Secretariat and then, on the union lawyer's account, custody. M.K. Stalin's word for this was backstabbing. Strip away the politics and the fact remains: a government that cannot distinguish negotiation from arrest will eventually make the same mistake with farmers, teachers and transport workers, because custody is easier than arithmetic.

Periyar taught that self-respect begins where fear of authority ends. Anna built a politics on the dignity of ordinary labour. A nurse on Rs 21,000 keeping a primary health centre alive is that labour. A worker dead beside a live wire is its price when safety is treated as paperwork. The TVK government was elected by people who believed the state could be run with more competence and more heart. This week it ran Chennai with handcuffs and a shutdown notice. The nurses have suspended their fast until November 3. The city should not suspend its memory.