The Madras High Court on Wednesday reserved orders on a public interest litigation petition filed against installation of a statue for former Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi in Tiruvannamalai town. The court deferred the verdict after it was informed that it had been planned to unveil the statue on June 3, his birth anniversary.
Justices M.S. Ramesh and Mohammed Shaffiq took the decision after Jeeva Educational Trust, managed by Minister for Public Works E.V. Velu’s son E.V. Kumaran, filed an application to the vacate an interim injunction granted by the court on May 19 restraining the Minister and the trust from going ahead with the installation of the statue.
Simultaneously, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) too filed an impleading petition. The party stated that the trust had purchased 92.5 square feet of land from one M. Rajendran in 2021 and gifted it to the party. However, the measurement was wrongly mentioned as 215 square feet in the sale deed as well as the gift deed.
Representing DMK as well as the trust, senior counsel S. Prabakaran told the court that the mistake was rectified on May 25 and that now the party was the absolute owner of 92.5 square feet of land on which the statue was to be installed. He accused the PIL petitioner of having filed the case without including DMK as a respondent.
Asserting that the statue was coming up only on a private land and that allegations of public lands having been encroached upon was completely wrong, he impressed upon the need for an urgent hearing of the case since the birth anniversary of the former Chief Minister was nearing.
On his part, Additional Advocate General J. Ravindran, representing the official respondents, questioned the maintainability of the PIL petition filed by G. Karthick, 39, an iron scrap merchant based in Chennai. The AAG wondered how a resident of Chennai could have any personal knowledge about the ground situation in Tiruvannamalai.
The law officer pointed out that the High Court rules, related to filing of PILs, required every litigant to disclose the specific sources from which he/she had collected information with respect to the allegations levelled by him/her. However, in the present case, the litigant had only made a general statement that he had made inquiries with the locals.
Finding force in their submissions, the judges asked the litigant’s counsel as to how he could be concerned with the happenings in Tiruvannamalai. They also wanted to know how a PIL petition would lie in the case of installation of a statue on a private patta land.
When the counsel claimed that the patta was fabricated, the judges said, in such a case, the petitioner should have challenged the validity of the patta and not file a PIL petition against installation of the statue.
In his affidavit, the petitioner had claimed that the statue had been planned on the girivalam (circumambulation) path around the Arunachaleswarar temple and that there was a threat of obliteration of a water channel too if the statue was allowed to be installed at the intended location.
