CHENNAI: DMK has approached Madras high court to quash an order of the state government appointing Mohan Pyare as the commissioner of the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption.
The petition filed by R.S. Bharathy, organization secretary of DMK and Rajya Sabha member, is likely to come up for hearing before the first bench headed by Chief Justice Indira Banerjee on Friday.
According to senior counsel P. Wilson, appearing for Bharathy, the state government in the recent past has been nominating the chief secretary or officer in the rank of additional chief secretary as the state vigilance commissioner.
The effect of such a nomination was that the entire state vigilance commission has lost its character as an independent, objective and transparent and autonomous body and become another wing of the state government, thereby defeating the very purpose of its constitution, Wilson added.
He said it was a matter of record that the residence of former chief secretary P. Ramamohana Rao was raided by the I-T officials on suspicion of possessing disproportionate assets to his known sources of income. The raid was connected with the raids conducted at the residence of mining baron Sekha Reddy, from whom '136 crore of currency notes was seized.
The I-T officials kept the state police in dark and summoned officials from the CRPF to carry out the search since they were apprehensive that the state police would not co-operate with the raid at Rao’s residence.
This case was the text book example to show that if the state vigilance commission was really to be an objective, impartial and autonomous body to check corruption and graft in the administrative machinery, then the Vigilance Commissioner cannot be the chief secretary or any other secretary to government but must be an independent officer appointed specially to the post with a secured tenure as done in the case of the Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation or the Central Vigilance Commission.
Moreover, Bharathy had already challenged the appointment of VK Jeyakodi as the Vigilance Commissioner and its pending.
While so, to make his petition infructuous and with an intention to nullify the order to be passed by the court, the present appointment was made, he added.
