HC adjourns plea to restrain ECI from approving July 11 GC meet

CHENNAI: The first bench of Madras High Court on Tuesday adjourned a writ petition filed for a direction to the Election Commission of India not to approve the resolutions passed in the July 11 General Council meeting of the AIADMK.

Heading the bench along with Justice Sunder Mohan, Acting Chief Justice M Duraiswamy passed the direction as the petitioner, an AIADMK cadre named S Suriya Moorthy sought time to adjourn the case. The petitioner submitted that he has to go through a division bench's order in connection with the AIADMK leadership issue.

The petitioner who appeared as a party in person in the case has also made a request to the ACJ to transfer his petition to some other bench. Suriya Moorthy who argued his matter in Tamil informed the court that when the ACJ and Justice Sunder Mohan were on the second bench, they set aside the August 17 order of a single judge and the said order of the second bench was in favor of the decisions made in the July 11 GC meeting of AIADMK.

Therefore, he said that the same judges are heading the first bench now and the matter should be referred to some other bench. However, the ACJ questioned how the petitioner could file this petition while he already filed a suit before another bench for relief and did not get any injunction.

As the ACJ asked whether the petitioner had read the order of a division bench of Madras HC, he claimed that he did not know any other language than Tamil and sought time for studying the order. Former Advocate General and senior counsel S Vijay Narayan representing the AIADMK submitted that the ECI could not interfere in the internal affairs of AIADMK.

Recording the submissions, the bench adjourned the matter for two weeks.