E-Paper
AIADMK’s IT wing battles rumours around Jaya’s health
CHENNAI: In a small room tucked away inside the AIADMK party office in Chennai, a group of young professionals is working round-the-clock. There is no major election
CHENNAI: In a small room tucked away inside the AIADMK party office in Chennai, a group of young professionals is working round-the-clock. There is no major election in the offing but the team has hardly any time to look up from its computer screens.
The men and women comprise the party’s IT wing that is battling rumours across Tamil Nadu about CM J Jayalalithaa’s health. Every day, they scour Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp and other media to scorch possible falsehoods, fake photos and videos and identify rumour mongers to hand over to the police.
“We work in three shifts, around the clock,” said G Ramachandran, AIADMK’s IT wing secretary. “A majority of offenders are people from Opposition parties, and a few are attention seekers. But the damage they do is equally dangerous.”
The dedicated team is only one cog of a massive machinery involving the state police, ruling party and government officials who are leading a massive crackdown against anyone spreading rumours about the CM, who has been hospitalised for more than three weeks.
The AIADMK chief was admitted to Chennai’s Apollo hospital with high fever and dehydration on September 22 but news of her treatment has been tightly controlled.
On Friday, police arrested two Canara Bank employees in Coimbatore — gold appraiser Suresh and clerk Ramesh — for spreading rumours about Jayalalithaa’s health in front of local AIADMK leader Puni tha Devi.
Devi complained to the police, who arrested the duo under non-bailable charges and threw them in jail. Too stunned to react, relatives of the two employees or the bank staff are scared to talk, lest it complicate their situation further.
Their lawyer told HT on Saturday morning that “these two are normal, respectable and law abiding citizens. On an oral complaint of a political person, they have been charged with offences that are non-bailable. But I will move an application on Monday”.
They aren’t the only ones. Police have registered more than 50 similar cases for “spreading rumours about the CM’s health”. The last arrest was of Antony Sesuraj from Tuticorin district on Saturday morning. Sesuraj said he had merely shared a social media post of a France-based Tamil person.
“We have formed a special team and are scanning different sites. More arrests are likely,” said a senior officer of the cyber crime cell. “We cannot allow people to spread rumours and create panic.” But activists condemn the arrests and branding of people as criminals just because they gossiped.
