An election petition has been filed in the Madras High Court to declare the election of AIADMK’s sidelined leader T.T.V. Dhinakaran from R.K. Nagar Assembly constituency as null and void. The petition filed by one of the contestants, M.L. Raj of Desiya Makkal Sakthi Katchi (DMSK), also sought to declare that the byelection held on December 21 was marred by corrupt practices and it was not a free and fair election.
The election petition was listed for hearing before Justice G. Jayachandran on Thursday since it suffered from certain technical defects in pasting necessary court fee stamps.
After hearing the preliminary arguments, the judge adjourned the case by a week. In his petition, Mr. Raj said he had secured 246 votes in the bypoll as against 89,013 votes obtained by Mr. Dhinakaran out of the 1,76,890 valid votes polled during the byelection.
Attributing such high votes secured by the winning candidate to corrupt practices, the petitioner said that an earlier notification issued by the Election Commission of India for conducting byelection for the constituency in April last year was rescinded due to complaints of large-scale corruption. Then, the allegation was primarily against Mr. Dhinakaran. Yet, he was allowed to contest in the bypoll in December and get elected.
The petitioner further alleged that contestants like him were not allowed to campaign freely during the elections since Mr. Dhinakaran, AIADMK candidate E. Madhusudhanan and DMK candidate N. Maruthu Ganesh had flooded the constituency with their men.
