Forty-one dead and the Chief Minister sees a conspiracy: Karur deserves answers, not theatre

Forty-one people are dead. Eighteen women. Ten children — five young girls, five young boys. They went to a political rally in Karur on a Saturday evening and they never came home. Everything else — the compensation announcements, the court petitions, the conspiracy theories — is noise around that single unbearable fact.

Consider what we already know. The Tamil Nadu Electricity Board's own chief engineer says there was no power cut while the Chief Minister spoke — and that the TVK's west secretary had asked for one in writing on September 26, a request rejected the same day. The organisers' generators and focus lights, the engineer said, switched off because of the crowd. In other words: the venue was overwhelmed by the very crowd the party summoned, and the machinery of the spectacle failed first.

And what is the Chief Minister's response? Not a statement of responsibility. Not the resignation of whoever signed off on crowd management. A "political conspiracy" — and a petition to the Madras High Court demanding a CBI probe. It is the oldest trick in the book: when the crowd you summoned becomes a casualty list, blame a plot. Conspiracies are convenient because they have no address; accountability has one, and it is uncomfortably close to home.

A one-member commission under retired judge Aruna Jagadeesan will inquire, as commissions do. But Tamil Nadu has buried enough inquiry reports to know how this ends: findings that arrive after the outrage has cooled, recommendations that gather dust, and a political class that has moved on to the next rally. The families of the 41 cannot afford that script.

There is a deeper rot here that no CBI probe will touch: the rally as the unit of politics. Crowds are summoned as proof of power, packed tighter with every election, managed as stagecraft rather than as human beings in a confined space. Karur is what happens when the spectacle outgrows the venue and the organisers confuse devotion with crowd control. Forty-one deaths are not a conspiracy. They are a verdict — on a politics that treats people as props. The Chief Minister should answer it, not outsource it.