Plea challenging civic polls dismissed
The Madras high court on Thursday dismissed a batch of petitions challenging the election to the Chennai city municipal corporation, held on October 17, 2011.
“The grievance of the petitioners that the order passed by the division bench on October 14 had been violated and it would result in automatic invalidation of election is unacceptable since there are no materials to prove large scale violations, poll related irregularities, booth capturing, rigging, bogus voting or any other exceptional and extraordinary circumstances to set aside the election by entertaining the petitions,” said a division bench of Justices D. Murugesan and K.K. Sasidharan.
The bench dismissed the petitions by the DMK through its legal wing secretary R.S. Bharathi and four others and also the contempt petitions by advocate G. Poonkunran and N. Narayanan and said the directions of this court dated October 14 to provide video recording in all polling booths had been substantially complied with, barring only a few polling booths even where random video recording had been done.
There were no materials to suggest that the failure to provide video recording in about 542 polling booths out of 4,875 polling booths had materially affected the election of the returned candidates warranting this court to interfere with the local body elections.
“The authorities have taken every possible effort and made all the necessary arrangements to comply with all the directions issued by the division bench on October 14 and, as such, they are not liable for contempt,” the bench said.
The court said a writ petition questioning the election can be entertained and was maintainable before this court in the event exceptional circumstances were established, as has been held earlier in the AIADMK vs State Election Commissioner case.
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