Chennai: A week after a showcause notice was issued by Tamil Nadu Assembly Privileges Committee to 20 DMK legislators including the party working president and State Opposition leader M.K. Stalin for displaying gutka sachets in the Assembly, they have approached the Madras high court to declare it as illegal.
A mention was made regarding this by senior counsel R. Shanmugasundaram before the first bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice M. Sundar to take up the matter for an urgent hearing on Wednesday. The bench has accepted to hear the matter on Thursday.
According to petitioner K.S. Ravichandran, a DMK MLA and other 20 MLA’s of the party, gutka sachets were displayed during the course of his speech and others on July 19, 2017, in the assembly. In order to highlight the flagrant violation of the ban on Gutka and to substantiate the allegations made in his earlier speech on July 8, 2017, the leader of the Opposition M.K. Stalin and other party members exhibited packets of Gutka as evidence.
The act of displaying the gutka packets was done in the public interest and in good faith to highlight the larger issue involved. However, based on the reference of the Speaker, the Privileges Committee met on August 28, 2017, and issued a show cause notice to the petitioner and 20 other legislators.
The show cause notice does disclose how the matter referred pertains to the privileges of the House and fails to disclose on what basis the Privileges Committee issued it.
He said “the notice is not innocuous or coincidental, and its sole motive to prevent party MLAs from exercising their legal and constitutional Right to vote during the floor test, which would likely to be conducted in the legislative Assembly”. The privilege proceedings are itself bad in law and without jurisdiction and hence liable to be set aside, he added.
