Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana of the Madras High Court on Tuesday agreed to hear on Wednesday, a batch of new writ petitions filed by DMK president M.K. Stalin and 17 other MLAs of his party challenging the show-cause notices issued to them on September 7 in connection with the 2017 breach of privilege proceedings.
The Leader of the Opposition and his party MLAs had displayed gutkha (chewing tobacco) sachets in the Legislative Assembly in July 2017 to highlight their availability freely in bunk shops despite the State having issued a Government Order in May 2017 banning the manufacture, transportation, storage, distribution and sale of gutkha.
Speaker P. Dhanapal took exception to display of the banned substance in the House without seeking his prior permission and referred the issue suo motu to the Committee of Privileges. In August 2017, the Committee issued show-cause notices to as many as 21 MLAs seeking explanation for the charge of having breached the privileges of the House.
All 21 MLAs moved writ petitions before the High Court and obtained interim protection from Justice M. Duraiswamy in 2017. Later, when the cases were listed before other single judges of the High Court due to changes of portfolio, they got referred to a Division Bench of the High Court due to the importance of the issue involved in the batch of cases.
In the meantime, two of the 21 DMK MLAs died and one more, Ku.Ka. Selvam, got dismissed from the party. Chief Justice Amreshwar Pratap Sahi and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy took the writ petitions for final hearing in August this year and held that the show-cause notices to the 19 MLAs suffered from a foundational error of assuming their conduct to be prohibited under law.
They left it to the Committee to act appropriately if it was still of the view that their conduct amounted to breach of privilege. The Committee met after the judgement and issued fresh show-cause notices to all 19 MLAs on September 7 leading to the present batch of new writ petitions which had to be heard by a single judge first, before being taken on appeal or referred to a Division Bench.
