Chennai: The First Bench of the Madras High Court has directed the authorities concerned to drop all cases registered against protesters involved in the anti-Sterlite agitation, which had ended in police firing that killed 13 people in May 2018.
In an interim order, the court said that the incident happened in 2018 and has gone out of the public mind, ‘but there were… people who lost their lives’.
It then ordered the Tamil Nadu government to further compensate families of those who died in the 2018 Sterlite firing. The court also requested the State to provide counselling to members of the families affected by the violence, if it is possible to do so.
The Madras High Court has called the police firing at anti-Sterlite protesters which killed 18 unarmed protestors in Thoothukudi ‘a scar on our democracy’. ‘We should never forget,’ the court said while hearing a plea to reopen an National Human Rights Commission case on the matter.