Tirupparakundram MLA A.K. Bose died on August 2 but an election petition pending in the Madras High Court, challenging his victory during the bypoll held in November 2016, took a new turn on Monday with the runner-up, P. Saravanan of DMK, urging the court to declare him a winner.
When the election petition came up for hearing before Justice P. Velmurugan, the counsel for Mr. Bose submitted his client’s death certificate. However, the election petitioner’s counsel V. Arun told the court he had filed two new applications and one of them was to declare his client as the winner.
Since the applications had not been listed for hearing, the judge directed the High Court Registry to number both of them and list them on Friday. In the first application, Dr. Saravanan, a Madurai-based oncologist, had contended that an election petition need not be dismissed just because the returned candidate was dead. “The demise of the returned candidate may not take away the impurity and flagrant breaches of law committed by the election officials (by accepting thumb impressions of former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa in the nomination papers) and the question of law is required to be considered by this honourable election tribunal.”
Since it was his case that the thumb impression had been obtained by fraud when Jayalalithaa was in hospital and that he would have won easily if the poll panel had rejected the “nomination” and not allotted the two leaves symbol to Mr. Bose, the petitioner said he should be declared the winner.