The Madras High Court’s first Division Bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice M. Sundar would begin hearing from November 16 a batch of cases filed against the disqualification of 18 AIADMK MLAs owing allegiance to sidelined leader T.T.V. Dhinakaran along with 21 other cases filed by DMK MLAs, including the Leader of the Opposition M.K. Stalin, challenging the privilege proceedings initiated against them.
The Chief Justice’s Bench decided to hear the case after senior counsel R. Shunmugasundaram of the DMK brought it to its notice that Justice K. Ravichandrabaabu had last week referred all those cases to a larger Bench since they involved constitutional issues. Advocate-General Vijay Narayan told the Bench that the single judge had referred totally 43 writ petitions to the Division Bench and that those batch of cases could be broadly categorised into four.
While the first category of 18 writ petitions related to disqualification of the AIADMK MLAs and the second category related to the privilege proceedings initiated against the 21 DMK MLAs, the third and fourth were those seeking a direction to conduct a floor test in the Assembly and the cases filed by DMK party men seeking disqualification of Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam and his team of MLAs for having voted against the government in the February 18 trust vote.
When the Bench was told that a battery of senior counsels from New Delhi including Kapil Sibal, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, C. Aryama Sundaram, Mukul Rohatgi, C.S. Vaidyanathan and Amarendra Saran had been appearing for the parties in the batch of cases before the single judge, the Chief Justice said that her Bench would begin with the hearing on November 16 irrespective of the availability of any of the senior counsel and that they could join during the subsequent hearings.
Earlier, senior counsel P.S. Raman, representing a section of the disqualified MLAs, said that he was willing to commence the arguments.
