Plea seeking compensation for cancelled elections dismissed

A division bench comprising Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad before whom a plea moved by Sahul Hameed of Naam Tamilar Katchi seeking ECI to pay Rs 1 crore as compensation and Rs 1.5 lakh towards expenses spent by the party during the cancelled Tiruvarur by-election, dismissed it citing lackof maintainability.

“The petitioner has to approach the common law remedy if either he or the party to which he is related has incurred expenditure and suffered damages,” the bench added.

The petitioner had submitted that following the Election Commission’s notification on December 31, 2018 announcing by-election to Tiruvarur constituency on January 28, 2019, the Naam Tamilar Katchi had announced his name as the candidate for the by-election.

Thereafter, he and his supporters started their election campaign by meeting the people regularly. Moreover, when the election was declared on December 31, 2018, the constituency was in bad shape as the constituency was affected by the cyclone.

He further submitted that even the State government had sent a report on the devastation caused by the cyclone and urged ECI to abstain from holding the election since the extension of relief to those affected could come to a halt. But notwithstanding this, the ECI which had announced the election date, took everyone by surprise later by cancelling the election on January 6, 2019.

Alleging that the ECI had not followed the due process of law in cancelling the elections, said owing to this, he suffered a loss of Rs 1.5 lakh which he had spent during his campaign. Based on this, he had sought the court to direct the EC to pay the amount he had spent and along with it pay up another Rs 1 crore towards compensation for the mental agony suffered by him.