Karur: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay on Friday has announced a memorial for victims of September 27, 2025 stampede at Karur. The announcement was made as Vijay was addressing the public during his maiden visit to Karur since the tragedy that took 41 lives.
Vijay is expected to distribute 32 appointment orders issued on compassionate grounds to relatives of the victims of the stampede, who died during a TVK rally.
During the speech, Vijay slammed the DMK for attempting to gain “political mileage” from the tragic stampede here last year and restraining him from visiting the district. Vijay faulted the police for not alerting him about the swelling crowd at the TVK venue on September 27 last, nor taking any steps to cancel the meeting as the crowd had become unmanageable to control.
“The police could have alerted us that the crowd was swelling and become unmanageable to control. The police have all the right to cancel the meeting. Without doing so, the police escorted us on the highway,” Vijay said during his first visit here after taking up the reins as chief minister in May.
Vijay could not meet the affected 41 families in Karur last year but had those affected families were brought near Chennai and he personally consoled them.
At the meeting today, Vijay said “I trusted the police fully and even thanked them at the meeting. I didn’t know about the drama. Who is responsible for this. Under whose instruction was all this done,” he asked.
“They tried to gain political mileage,” out of the tragedy, he said in an apparent reference to the DMK, then in the ruling saddle.
He said the Karur stampede has caused him immense anguish.
“We have lost children of our sisters in 2025 Karur stampede,” he said.
Later, he took out a road show, with people queuing up on either sides of the road in good numbers. He waved at them and greeted them with folded hands.
He would later distribute the appointment orders for jobs in various government departments at a government function at the Collector’s office premises and lay the foundation for the Rs 1500 crore worth non-leather footwear manufacturing unit of Evervan Kothari Footwear Private Limited, which would come up at Krishnarajapuram in Karur district.
However, the opposition parties termed the move as politically motivated. DMK organization secretary R S Bharathi urged the State government and the CBI, investigating the stampede case to ensure that the Chief Minister’s visit to Karur and distribution of appointment orders did not unduly influence the families of the victims of the September 27, 2025 tragedy and the witnesses to the stampede.
Responding to Bharathi’s representation to the supervisory committee, appointed by the Supreme Court to monitor the case, on July 7 to issue the necessary orders to the Chief Secretary of the State and the CBI to ensure that those injured in the tragedy were also not influenced by the visit, chairperson of the committee Justice (Retired) Ajay Rastogi informed that the complaint had been forwarded to the CBI for fair investigation and appropriate action.
Objecting to the distribution of appointment orders, CPM State secretary P Shanmugham said that issuing the orders even before as the CBI had completed the probe would be detrimental to the outcome of the investigation and raised the question if it was fair for the government to compensate those who were killed while attending a TVK election rally.
While it was a different thing for the TVK government to procure jobs for people from the affected families in the private sector, for appointing such persons in government departments, proper guidelines needed to framed and followed, he said, urging the government to withhold the distribution of the orders till the guidelines were framed, he said.
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