Consider repeating poll process for 12 cooperative societies, HC tells govt.

The Madras High Court on Tuesday wanted to know from the Tamil Nadu State Cooperative Societies Election Commission the possibility of repeating the election process for about 12 cooperative societies in which unfair methods were allegedly adopted to reject the nominations of certain candidates and declare the others as elected unopposed on Monday.

Justice T. Raja asked advocate M.S. Palanisamy, representing the commission, to ascertain its stand by Wednesday. The judge said that it may not be difficult to repeat the election process for a dozen more societies when the commission had already deferred the elections for over 70 cooperative societies in view of complaints received from various quarters.

Earlier, the court witnessed heated arguments between Senior Counsel P. Wilson, who led the arguments on behalf of petitioners whose nominations had been rejected for the cooperative elections held in Chennai, Vellore, Coimbatore, Namakkal, Erode and many other districts, and Additional Advocate General P.H. Arvindh Pandian representing the State government.

Wondering how a majority of the societies could have elected candidates unanimously, the Senior Counsel accused the government of manoeuvring the electoral process to the benefit of ruling party men. However, the AAG denied such allegations as baseless and pointed out that the nominations were rejected due to mistakes committed by the candidates.

In the meantime, the court was informed that election commission had taken up the task of conducting elections to 1.81 lakh posts in 18,435 societies in the State. The elections had been planned to be conducted in four phases. The first phase of the elections was held on Monday for 4,698 societies with 46,084 posts.

However, the election for 71 of those societies were cancelled due to receipt of various complaints and elections were held only for 332 societies since the candidates had got elected unanimously in the rest of the societies.