The Madras High Court on Wednesday dismissed writ appeals preferred by the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and former Law Minister C.Ve. Shanmugam against a single judge’s order quashing the State acquisition of former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s Poes Garden residence Veda Nilayam to convert it into a memorial.
A Division Bench of Justices Paresh Upadhyay and Sathi Kumar Sukumara Kurup concurred with Justice N. Seshasayee that there were procedural irregularities in the proceedings initiated during the AIADMK regime for acquiring the bungalow under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.
No substantial ground
The Bench also agreed with senior counsel AR.L. Sundaresan and Satish Parasaran, representing Jayalalithaa’s nephew J. Deepak and niece J. Deepa, that the appellants before the court had not raised any substantial ground to explain how the findings of the single judge, with respect to procedural irregularities, were contrary to record.
Pointing out that Mr. Deepak and Ms. Deepa had been declared as the legal heirs of Jayalalithaa by another Division Bench of Justices N. Kirubakaran (since retired) and Abdul Quddhose, the Bench led by Justice Upadhyay said the objections raised by the siblings to the acquisition proceedings were not considered properly by the State.
“The State did not even accept the status of the writ petitioners (before the single judge) to be the owners of the said property... For the above reasons, we are in agreement with the finding recorded in the impugned (under challenge) judgment that the acquisition in question was procedurally illegal and we confirm the said part of the judgement,” the Bench wrote.
Authoring the verdict, Justice Upadhyay also held that there was no public purpose, as envisaged under the 2013 Act, behind the acquisition of the private property by the State.
He also pointed out that the present writ appeals had been filed by third parties who were not at all represented before the single judge.
Though AIADMK claimed that there was no occasion for it to get impleaded in the proceedings before the single judge because then the State government was pursuing the matter earnestly, the Bench wrote: “This stand indicates that at the relevant time, AIADMK misconstrued itself as ‘appropriate Government’ which it was not.”
Since the State had now decided to accept the single judge’s verdict and handed over the keys of the bungalow to the legal heirs, the Division Bench held that the government could not be forced by the court to pursue the acquisition proceedings. “According to us, it would be neither legal nor proper to give any such direction,” it concluded.
