The Madras High Court on Monday decided to wait for written arguments by the Legislative Assembly Secretary before reserving its verdict on a batch of petitions seeking to disqualify Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam and his team of MLAs who voted against the Edappadi K. Palaniswami government during a floor test on February 18, 2017. The petitions were filed by DMK whip R. Sakkarapani and a few of the 18 disqualified AIADMK MLAs including P. Vetrivel.
Initially, Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quddhose came close to reserving their judgment. They even instructed the Court Officer to record that the arguments in the batch of cases had been concluded just seconds before being told that the Assembly Secretary was yet to submit his written arguments though all others had done so. Government Pleader (GP) T.N. Rajagopalan told the court that the Assembly Secretary had taken a stand that he had no submissions to make on the issue.
He recalled that Advocate-General Vijay Narayan had on February 22 argued that there was no valid prayer in the case as on date, and therefore, the Assembly Secretary had nothing to submit. It was pointed out that the petitioners had given an undertaking before the Supreme Court that they would not insist on their original prayer seeking a direction to the Speaker to disqualify Mr. Panneerselvam and his MLAs because the apex court was yet to decide whether the courts could issue such a direction.
‘No real prayer’
Though the petitioners subsequently filed an application before the High Court to amend their prayer and urged the court to declare the MLAs to have been disqualified without issuing a direction to the Speaker, that amendment application was yet to be ordered. Therefore, “the Assembly Secretary’s submission is that there is really no prayer, as on date, in these petitions, and so there is no necessity for him to make any submissions,” the A-G had said.
When the judges’ attention was drawn to that submission, the Chief Justice asked the GP to put them in writing by Wednesday and directed the High Court Registry to list the case under the caption ‘For Directions’ on that day.
The MLAs who were sought to be disqualified included V.C. Arukutty representing Kavundampalayam constituency, S.P. Shunmuganathan (Srivaikuntam), K. Manickam (Sholavandan), A. Manoharan (Vasudevanallur), N. Manoranjitham (Uthangarai), Minister for Tamil Official Language and Tamil Culture K. Pandiarajan (Avadi), S.S. Saravanan (Madurai South), S. Semmalai (Mettur), O.K. Chinnaraj (Mettupalayam) and R. Natraj (Mylapore).
