May 01, 2024 07:26 AM IST
Madras HC rejects plea for special polling in Coimbatore for voters with missing names. Petitioner failed to check voter list, court rules. BJP alleges deletions.
The Madras high court on Tuesday dismissed a plea seeking a special polling in Coimbatore parliamentary constituency for the voters whose names were missing from the list in the Lok Sabha elections concluded on April 19.
The bench comprising of chief justices Sanjay V Gangapurwala and justice G Chandrasekharan ruled that the court cannot pass such orders after the polling has already concluded, while observing that the petitioner R R Suthanthira Kannan, a Coimbatore native who is working as a doctor in Australia, had failed to check the draft and final voters’ list published by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
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The petitioner Kannan, who travelled to Coimbatore to vote in the April 19 Lok Sabha elections from Australia, couldn’t find his name in the electoral rolls. Last week, he moved the high court, seeking a direction to the ECI to conduct a special polling for people like him whose names have been omitted from the voters’ list.
The counsel for the EC submitted to the court that the final list was published in January. “The provisional list was published even before that. The petitioner did not raise any objection to the provisional or final list. In light of the submission and the facts of the case, no orders can be passed now,” the court said.
The petition comes amid Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate for Coimbatore constituency K Annamalai alleged that names of more than 100,000 people have been deleted from the voters’ list. BJP cadres and Annamalai’s supporters also held a protest in Coimbatore against removal of their names from the voter’s list.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Divya Chandrababu is an award-winning political and human rights journalist based in Chennai, India. Divya is presently Assistant Editor of the Hindustan Times where she covers Tamil Nadu & Puducherry. She started her career as a broadcast journalist at NDTV-Hindu where she anchored and wrote prime time news bulletins. Later, she covered politics, development, mental health, child and disability rights for The Times of India. Divya has been a journalism fellow for several programs including the Asia Journalism Fellowship at Singapore and the KAS Media Asia- The Caravan for narrative journalism. Divya has a master’s in politics and international studies from the University of Warwick, UK. As an independent journalist Divya has written for Indian and foreign publications on domestic and international affairs.
