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In the Tamil Nadu Assembly on September 7, Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay wanted to talk about decorum. He was making a point about political inheritance — “take the good from the old politics, leave the bad.” In the same speech, he also levelled corruption allegations against the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), reaching back to the 1978 Sarkaria Commission findings on alleged tender irregularities during the Karunanidhi years, and to more recent allegations related to TASMAC and municipal administration, which led to Enforcement Directorate investigations against DMK chief MK Stalin, Udhayanidhi Stalin, and V Senthil Balaji. He also spoke disparagingly about the incarceration of DMK leaders under the the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971, or MISA, during the Emergency era.
“Whatever we talk about, our friends keep saying we saw MISA, we saw MISA. All of us know the history of MISA very well.” He made the jaw gesture that had, by then, become a kind of shorthand of its own.
The DMK and other parties immediately alleged that the gesture referred to how Stalin’s face was deformed during his MISA detention, an allegation that the CM denied.
MISA was the law under which Indira Gandhi's government detained political opponents without trial during the Emergency. Under Section 3 of the Act, the Union or state government could order a person's detention if it was satisfied that this was necessary to prevent them from acting in ways prejudicial to the security of India, the security of the state, public order, or essential supplies and services.
In Tamil Nadu, the DMK bore the brunt of such political detentions, with over 400 of its members jailed under it in 1976 alone. Stalin, then a young DMK legislator, was among those detenus, lodged in Madras Central Prison's ninth block in February 1976, where, as the Ismail Commission later found, he and others were beaten on the orders of the jail’s Superintendent and jailer.
TVK’s minister for power CTR Nirmal Kumar went further, insinuating that Stalin’s arrest was for something else. “Under MISA, people had been arrested for theft, for robbery, for offences concerning women. It could not be assumed that everyone swept up during those months in 1976 had been arrested because of MISA. There were other reasons,” he said.
Nowhere, Nirmal said, is there a record that Stalin was arrested specifically in connection with MISA. “He was arrested for making derogatory remarks against women, but there is no record to say that he was arrested because of MISA,” he said.
The AIADMK government’s own 1977 order setting up the inquiry, however, tells a different story.
The order appointing Justice MM Ismail as a one-man commission described its subject as the “alleged ill-treatment and beating of political prisoners in Madras Central Prison.” Its terms of reference specifically asked the Commission to inquire into allegations of harassment and ill-treatment of MISA detenus in the Central Prison during February, March, April, and May 1976.
The government-appointed Ismail Commission spent three months in 1977 investigating allegations of custodial torture and human rights violations. The findings were based on around 60 testimonies, hospital records, a dead man's diary, and the confession of the warder who carried out the beatings. The Ismail Commission report named DMK leaders MK Stalin, Chittibabu, Arcot Veerasamy, K Vezhavendan and NVN Selvam among those beaten in the ninth block that night.
This means, if Stalin was a witness before the Commission, that was because he was a political prisoner detained under MISA.
The ninth block
On the last day of January 1976, the DMK ministry in Tamil Nadu was dismissed, the Assembly dissolved, and President's rule imposed. Within hours, arrests began across the state under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act.
MK Stalin, then a young DMK legislator, recently married, was one of 39 political detenus brought to the Central Prison, Madras, on the evening of February 1. So was Chittibabu, a sitting Lok Sabha MP and the party's treasurer, as well as Dravidar Kazhagam leaders K Veeramani and NS Sambandham, who had undergone two spinal operations and was still recovering from them.
According to the Justice Ismail Commission report, the Central Prison authorities already knew they were coming. A secret communication from the Commissioner of Police had reached the gate at 1.50 pm that afternoon, warning that a large number of arrests were likely and asking the Superintendent to keep accommodation ready.
There were two blocks available that evening: the Quarantine Special, which was already empty, closer to the entrance, with better ventilation and working sanitation; and the ninth block, in the prison's far western corner, isolated, a block the commission later found had previously held prisoners with leprosy, hurriedly vacated that same day.
The jailer chose the ninth block. When the commission's judge asked him why, his answers contradicted each other and then contradicted the physical measurements the judge had taken himself during an inspection visit.
Thirty-nine men were searched twice — once by warders, again on the jailer's specific order, in a way several of them would later describe as ‘deliberately humiliating’.
The testimonies state that they were given no food that first night. They were kept locked up round-the-clock, denied even daytime access to a toilet, until a visiting Deputy Inspector-General of Prisons happened to notice and ordered it stopped, twelve days later.
Chittibabu’s diary
At around eight o'clock, warders and convict-warders opened the cells one at a time, starting from cell ten, working down. Each occupant was told he was being brought out for a search. What happened instead was an assault on prisoners by warders lined up with lathis, the Commission found, based on a prisoner’s diary and various testimonies.
The diary examined and verified by the Ismail Commission, belonged to Chittibabu who died on January 5, 1977, eleven months later. It was handed over to the Commission by Chittibabu’s wife.
In it, Chittibabu described being the first to be ordered out of his cell, and being struck the moment he stepped through the door. He described being pushed against a wall, and kicked in the stomach. Chittibabu describes seeing Stalin, with his hands folded and pleading, and being worried that he would be beaten to death. He proceeds to state:
"Other people were lying on the ground and they were not able to get up for help, because they were Yama's messengers! I immediately took a decision! Suddenly I ran across pushing thambi! The lathis were on the neck! They were not beatings! They were like the beatings on the red-hot iron in a black-smithy! They were the blows of a sledge hammer on my neck! After bearing all these things I was able to push my loving thambi into the cell! That gave me satisfaction!”
Chittibabu's account also speaks about a man referred to by his pen-name Adiyar, collapsing and nearly dying in his cell, and a doctor being summoned in the middle of the night, which the commission found reliable after testimony from the prison's junior doctor..
Evidence produced by the police
The jailer's report book on the incidents that happened on the night of February 2 logged them as "light force" being used on resisting detenus, but the prison's own Deputy Inspector-General testified that the detenus were kept locked up round-the-clock with no explanation. Two later entries backdating a pattern of "misbehaviour" appeared but the Commission concluded they were fabricated to make the beating look like routine discipline.
The most direct evidence came fifteen months later, from the man who had done the beating himself: Surulirajan, the Chief Head Warder who was by then transferred to Tiruchi.
In July 1977, he swore an affidavit that he had been ordered by the Superintendent and the jailer to beat the MISA detenus that evening. He said stones, sand and neem oil were added to the detenus' food on his superiors' instructions and that Chittibabu had been beaten repeatedly on the pretext of being summoned to the Superintendent's office. This led to Chittibabu developing urinary and abdominal complications that, in Surulirajan's own view, contributed directly to his death. He said he had carried out the orders against his conscience, and that afterward he could not eat or sleep properly for a week.
The Superintendent's side produced a second affidavit from Surulirajan, sworn days later, retracting everything. Surulirajan then claimed that retraction had been extracted by intimidation. The Commission investigated his claims and concluded the retraction was coerced.
Chittibabu died of a heart attack on January 5, 1977, after two surgeries.
The Commission did not find that the beatings directly caused his death eleven months later. It found that the physical abuse and the psychological weight of those months had aggravated the suffering that led to it.
The Commission found that Superintendent K Vidyasagaran was the "prime mover" with “maximum” responsibility, who planned the operation and personally supervised the beating up of prisoners from the compound gate.
Jailer MA Khyum was found to have executed these rights violations alongside him.
Chief Head Warder Surulirajan and the named warders who carried out the beating were held responsible too. The Commission also rejected the defence that they were "just following orders."
The Inspector-General of Prisons, Paramaguru, was found not to be an active participant but a "passive spectator" whose failures gave "indirect encouragement" to what happened. The report stopped short of extending responsibility to any political figures beyond flagging the "extraordinary expedition" behind official favours shown to Vidyasagaran afterward.