Theni Jailbreak Puts Vijay Government on the Defensive

Within a day of the jailbreak in Theni, a clip from an old Tamil film was doing the rounds on social media. In it, a young Vijay, playing a prisoner, collapses in a cell and begins to convulse. An unsuspecting policeman, played by Vijayakumar, rushes in to help. He is overpowered, and the prisoner breaks out. The irony is that Vijay is now Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, and the prisons department answers to his government.

At about 10 on the night of Monday, 26 October, prisoners in the third block of the Theni District Jail at Thekkampatti, near Andipatti, raised the alarm that one of them was having a seizure. The block held 32 undertrials. Seventeen would leave the jail that night, facing charges that included murder, robbery, drug offences and offences under the Arms Act and the POCSO Act. When warder Stalin Prabhu went in to check on the prisoner, the inmates attacked him. They used spoons and improvised blades, and Thangapandi was injured in the assault. He was taken to hospital with head injuries. The prisoners seized the keys, opened the main gate and walked out. South Zone Inspector General Vijayendra Bidari called it an “epilepsy drama”. One doesn’t need to explain the reference in Tamil Nadu.

The scene was too close to the Chief Minister’s own filmography for the opposition to resist, and it came at a useful moment. Ten days earlier, a TVK functionary from Nagapattinam, Boobalan, had been arrested in connection with a 135-kg methamphetamine seizure. The drugs were allegedly bound for Sri Lanka. Former chief minister MK Stalin had called the ruling party “not just a Bad Party, but a Breaking Bad Party”. On Tuesday, he posted: “Following Breaking Bad, Prison Break has now begun in Tamil Nadu.” “I thought the government was only failing to monitor criminals released on bail,” he said. He called the TVK government “a bunch of incompetent, good-for-nothing people”, and said Tamil Nadu had reached a state “where people have to protect themselves”. DMK MP Kanimozhi, said the government could neither arrest criminals nor keep the ones it had.

AIADMK’s Edappadi K Palaniswami drew attention to Vijay’s surprise inspection of Puzhal Central Prison in Chennai in August. Vijay had questioned officials about food, phones, drugs and custodial deaths, and said that many inmates had been brought there by circumstance and that prisons should give them a chance to reform. In the week before the Theni jailbreak, two men had escaped from Puzhal: a Nepali undertrial, suspected of scaling a wall, and a POCSO convict who allegedly slipped away from the prison bazaar. Palaniswami mocked the Chief Minister’s “inspection” and suggested the government’s lapses be compiled into a souvenir for its first 150 days in office.

PMK’s Anbumani Ramadoss, reportedly in alliance talks with TVK, said scenes once confined to films were now taking place in jails. The Congress, TVK’s ally, called for senior officials to be held accountable.

Investigators say the escape plan took shape quickly, though later accounts suggest inmate Linga Prasath had raised the idea before that evening. Some inmates had learned that their bail pleas had been rejected. Police allege that Linga Prasath, who is partially disabled, proposed the escape and that Muthu Elangovan played the patient. The men got out of the jail through the main gate, past the four guards who were on duty.

Thekkampatti jail stands on about 10 acres at the foot of the hills, and most of the 17 inmates ran into the scrub behind it. Police formed 17 special teams and put more than 300 personnel, drones and sniffer dogs into the field. Praveen Kumar of Perungudi was found near a watchtower in the forest with thorns in his feet. Linga Prasath took a share auto towards Kanavilakku. A constable recognised him and alerted the driver, who took him back to the jail. Drones helped police locate eight more in the surrounding hills on Tuesday. The brothers K Thirupathy and K Meenakshi Sundaram were the last of the escapees to be arrested, near the Gudalur bypass while allegedly heading for Kerala. Police put the whole operation at 43 hours. Without drones, it may have taken a lot longer.

Indian prisons have seen bigger escapes, to be sure. In November 2005, Maoists stormed the Jahanabad jail in Bihar and freed hundreds of inmates. In 1995, 43 suspected LTTE members escaped from a special camp inside Vellore Fort through a tunnel. But Vellore was a detention camp, not a working prison, which makes Theni the largest mass escape from an operational jail in Tamil Nadu in decades.