If the DMK can win a dozen of these assembly seats, it can topple the AIADMK government and wrest power after eight long years. Even more crucial for the DMK are the by-elections for 18 assembly seats to be held simultaneously, necessitated by the defection of legislators from the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) to VK Sasikala’s breakaway faction, the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK), headed by her nephew TTV Dhinakaran. It is this soup of emotions the opposition led by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) seeks to profit from when Pollachi, and Tamil Nadu, go to vote for the Lok Sabha Elections on April 18. There’s outrage, confusion and collective shame - all at once. “The boys should be shot in full public view and hung upside down right in front of the Gandhi statue,” is the prevailing sentiment. Persistence, accompanied with the intent to offer more business, can pump-prime conversations shortly thereafter, their anger boils over. Multiple teams of investigating police officers from across the district have booked into the few big hotels in Questions are parried it’s almost as if the locals have made a compact to remain quiet. Shop owners are reticent to strike up a conversation about the sex racket. Newspaper vendors, restaurant waiters and tea

Now, columns of lathi-wielding policemen, and a bus full of better armed riot police, line Pollachi’s main square, at whose axis sits a silver-painted statue of Mahatma Gandhi. It’s an ideal base campįor tourists headed towards the Palakkad pass to the west, the Anamalai forest reserve, the hill stations of Udumalpet, Valparai, or pilgrimage hill town Is best known for its vast coconut plantations, and as the Tamil film industry’s favourite location outside of Chennai and its studios. Pollachi, with a population of 100,000, prided itself on its low crime rate. Nor the effect it has had in idyllic Pollachi. Still, that doesn’t lessen the crime of the young men. There’s nothing to suggest, based on reports from the police, locals, and even the families of some of the arrested men, that the numbers are anywhere close. Members of various Tamil organisations hold placards and raise slogans during a protest against the Pollachi sex scandal, in Chennai, Friday, March 15, 2019.(PTI photo)

Media speculation of the existence of nearly a thousand such “rape-porn” videos shot by the men, involving more than 300 young women over the past seven years, has dented the self-esteem of this small town, 40km south of Coimbatore. The Februsexual assault of a 19-year old in Pollachi by four men, and the graphic videos of the gang rape of other young women by the same group of men that surfaced earlier this month have shocked Tamil Nadu.

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