Four farmers, including one who organised the fact-finding tour of Swaraj India Party president Yogendra Yadav which led to his arrest last week, were detained by the Cheyyar police outside the tahsildar’s office at Cheyyar in Tiruvannamalai on Wednesday.
Arul, Arumugam, Siva, and Muthukumaran were detained while assisting fellow farmers in making photocopies of their petitions of objections to the proposed land acquisition for the Salem-Chennai Expressway project for submission to the special tahsildar of Cheyyar. They had been issued with summons of inquiry over their objections to the project.
According to a spokesperson for the now-revised six-lane expessway project, Arul was at a photocopy centre outside the office of the special tahsildar of Cheyyar, where the farmers had come to hand over their petitions against the project. He was photocopying petitions while others were recording videos on their phones of farmers arriving at the premises with their petitions. They were picked up and taken to the Cheyyar police station without any explanation.
The summons were issued pursuant to objections raised by the farmers earlier under the National Highways Act 48/1956 under Section 3 A (1). The district administration’s land acquisition tahsildars had issued similar summons of inquiry under Section 3 C of the Highways Act in Harur and Paapireddypatty in Dharmapuri district.
‘We pre-empted trouble’
Later, Devan, another farmer, was detained.
The detainees were all farmers who stood to lose their land to the project.
When contacted, Superintendent of Police Sibi Chakravarthi said, “They were detained under Section 151 as preventive detention. We pre-empted trouble.”
In the afternoon, Swaraj India Party leader Yogendra Yadav condemned the police action in a tweet. He also posted a video showing a heavy police posse preventing en masse movement of farmers outside the Cheyyar special tahsildar’s office. Soon after, the detained farmers were released on Wednesday evening.