TTV camp upbeat as SC to hear MLAs’ case tomorrow

With disqualified MLA Thangathamizhselvan’s bid to withdraw his petition against Speaker P Dhanapal’s disqualification order and force a bypoll to his Andipatti constituency not taking off yet as the third judge has not commenced the hearing till now, the apex court taking up the case on Wednesday has lifted the spirits of Dhinakaran’s camp.

Some of the legal experts hadsuggested the idea to the 18 MLAs immediately after the split verdict.

Former Advocate General K Subramanian said, “The 18 MLAs can also ask the Supreme Court to stay the Speaker’s order since one of the judges had set it aside.

There are strong grounds for giving a stay to the order since the legislators are people’s representatives. Even if the court declined the original prayer, it may fix a time frame for the third judge to complete the case.” One of the advocates belonging to the Dhinakaran camp said the details of the arguments could not be revealed immediately, but the major point of contention would be the delay of nine months in the Madras High Court even while the Constitution mandated that a constituency could not be left unrepresented for more than six months.

The ruling AIADMK functionaries said they would tell the court that it would be a wrong precedent to allow transfer of the case from the Madras High Court based on contentions that the litigants had no faith in the lower judiciary. One of the party functionaries said the party’s legal team would put forward effective arguments to impress upon the Supreme Court that the petitioners should follow the legal course of moving from lower courts to the higher courts and should not resort to bypass norms.

While one of the disqualified MLAs Thangathamizhselvan decided to withdraw the case, the others decided to allow the Andipatti MLA to his strategy while they would stick to the legal approach.

However, Thangathamizhselvan’s course had run into rough weather with threats of contempt of court, procedural wrangles and delay in withdrawal of the case besides doubts on whether he would be allowed to contest in the same seat again.