Chennai: DMK seeks permission to hold public meetings

Chennai: The DMK party has approached the Madras high court to direct the police to grant permission for its proposed public meetings across the state against the ruling AIADMK government.

Justice R. Mahadevan before whom the petition filed by R.S. Bharathi, the organising secretary of DMK came up for hearing, adjourned it to October 3, after advocate general Vijay Narayan sought time to get instructions.

In his petition, Bharathi submitted that the DMK, which was the main opposition party with 88 MLAs in the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly, has taken a decision to organise meetings through out the state on October 3 and 4 under the banner ‘Commission-Collection-Corruption against the present AIADMK government’.
 
As per the decision of the party, all the respective district and town secretaries have given representations to the competent police officials requesting them to grant permission to conduct the public meetings in the notified places and to give adequate police protection. But all the applications were rejected, Bharathi added.

When the petition came up for hearing on Monday, senior counsel P. Wilson, appearing for DMK submitted that same rejection orders were passed by all the competent police officer through out the state where the applications were made. The DGP has passed an universal order, Wilson added and sought a direction to the DGP to pass orders on all the applications.

Opposing the same, advocate general said no such universal order was passed by the DGP. Only in Karur, the application was rejected because the place selected by the applicant was small and in other places the applications were made only on September 28 and 29.

Declining to entertain a plea from Wilson to ask AG to get instructions today itself, the judge posted to October 3, further hearing of the case.