Chinks in security makes HC a sitting duck

CHENNAI: At a high-level meeting at the State Secretariat on Saturday, Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa took up a sensitive and ticklish issue for discussion with her administrative and security mandarins: protection of the Madras High Court.Sources said the CM demanded answers from them about the existing security apparatus and the future measures needed to protect the most important seat of judiciary in the State.For, a total of 78 courts – 38 high court and 40 others – thousands of litigants flooding them daily and 2,500 four-wheelers and 3,000 two-wheelers entering and exiting the premises everyday make the building a high profile, soft target.The chinks in security were first exposed when two groups of law students clashed on November 12, 2008. Video footage, photos and eyewitness accounts testified to the fact that the policemen on the premises were mere spectators, when a student was severely thrashed by a rival group .The relations between lawyers and policemen, always an exercise in one-upmanship, turned into a bloody confrontation inside the court on February 19, 2009. “After the advocates burnt down the B-4 police station inside the court, police personnel were withdrawn from the premises and asked to provide only peripheral security,” a senior officer said.Add to that the issue of frisking. Last year, it became a free-for-all at the court, when lawyers waved black flags to CM M Karunanidhi at a function for not initiating action against the police officers involved in the 2009 incident. “The lawyers smuggled the black cloth into the venue, hiding them inside their waist belts,” a police officer at the scene had then claimed. “We were not permitted to frisk them.”Security has now been stepped up at all the five gates, ACP K N Murali said. “Only vehicles of judges and advocates are permitted entry…We are checking the ID cards of advocates and the ID cards and case files of litigants before allowing them inside,” he claimed.“The truth is that anybody in white shirt and black trousers can walk inside,” the officer conceded. The need of the hour is a comprehensive security mechanism .