Capital punishment

The custodial death of the father-son duo in Sathankulam has brought to the fore flaws within the home department

- LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

ON MARCH 24, the day the nationwide lockdown was announced, a video shot near Chennai’s Spencer Plaza went viral. The video showed a cop managing traffic appealing to commuters with folded hands to stay indoors even as reports came in from many parts of the country that policemen had to resort to force to enforce the lockdown.

A few months later, however, the image of the Tamil Nadu police lay in tatters. The custodial torture and the death of a father and son in Sathankulam, a small town in southern Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district, has brought to the fore the flaws within the home department, which is headed by Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami.

On June 24, as massive protests broke out in Sathankulam demanding justice for 58-year-old Ponraj Jayaraj and his 31-year-old son, J. Bennix, Palaniswami was in Coimbatore, reviewing Covid relief work. “The father died of respiratory illness and the son died of heart attack,” said the chief minister.

It all began on June 18 after Jayaraj kept his mobile phone store open beyond the permitted time during the Covid-19 lockdown. After he allegedly questioned the police, he was taken to the police station the next day. Bennix, who went to the station looking for his father, too, was taken into custody. Eyewitness accounts said Jayaraj and Bennix bled from their anuses after the police roughed them up. According to a handwritten statement from the Sathankulam government hospital accessed by THE WEEK, there were multiple marks of violence on Jayaraj’s and Bennix’s buttocks. The son had a sulcus (depression) on the right knee.