Chennai, Aug 8 : The Madras High Court is hearing the arguments of the DMK and the Tamil Nadu government in the case filed by the opposition party against the government's decision not to allot land at Marina Beach to bury late DMK President M. Karunanidhi.
The DMK wants him interred near the seafront memorial of DMK founder and Karunanidhi's mentor C.N. Annadurai.
The DMK approached the Madras High Court on Tuesday night. The hearing went on till midnight when the court adjourned the case directing the state government and Chennai Corporation to file their affidavits on Wednesday.
The AIADMK government late on Tuesday rejected the request and asked the DMK to bury Karunanidhi on Sardar Patel Road which is home to memorials dedicated to Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) and K. Kamaraj.
Earlier all the petitioners who had filed a case against the memorial for AIADMK's late Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa said they are withdrawing their petitions and the court dismissed their pleas.
On Wednesday the government counsel argued the DMK party is politicising the burial of Karunanidhi.
The court asked the government counsel to explain the legal issues in allotting space at Marina Beach as mentioned in the statement issued by the government on Tuesday.
The DMK counsel argued that the government is citing minor issues for rejecting the party's request for space at Marina Beach for burying Karunanidhi.
The DMK said Karunanidhi is an ardent follower of party founder and Annadurai. Since AIADMK founder M.G. Ramachandran was also a follower of Annadurai he was buried near the latter's memorial.
According to DMK, the ideologies of late Congress leaders like Rajagopalachari and Kamaraj are different from that of what was followed by Dravidian leaders like Annadurai and Karunanidhi.
Hence it will not be appropriate to bury Karunanidhi at the site offered by the state government.
The DMK also argued that the Chennai Corporation has announced the Annadurai memorial Beach as a burial site.
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New Delhi (PTI): Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday said the Opposition is protesting for the right to vote for every Indian and demanded a "clean and pure" voter list, asserting that the issue of alleged irregularities pointed out by him will "explode" soon as it is not related to a single constituency but the whole country.
Indicating that he would not submit a signed affidavit as sought by the Election Commission, Gandhi asserted that the data analysed by the Congress to provide "proof" of "vote theft" is taken from the EC website.
"This is their data. It is not my data that I should sign. It is their data only and has been taken from their website. This is only a move to distract," he told reporters.
The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, who participated in a protest march by the opposition on the "vote theft" issue, said the Election Commission is "silent" as the truth is before the entire nation after his charge that over one lakh votes in an assembly constituency in Karnataka were found to be fake in a research conducted by his party.
"Another thing I want to tell is that this has not just happened in Bangalore, but in different constituencies across the country, and the Election Commission knows this. The EC knows that this data will explode. What it is trying to control and hide, we will bring it out, and it will explode. The EC knows this," he told reporters.
Gandhi was briefly detained along with others as police stopped the protest march by opposition MPs from Parliament House to the EC office.
"They (EC) cannot talk as the truth is before the entire nation," the Congress leader said as he was being taken away in a bus by the police.
"This fight is not political, but for saving the Constitution," he asserted.
This fight is for 'one man, one vote' and we want a clean, pure voter list," the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha added.
He said all the MPs of the INDIA alliance were stopped and taken into custody when they were going to meet the Election Commission.
"The truth of 'vote theft' is now before the country. This fight is not political; it is a fight to protect democracy, the Constitution, and the right to ‘one person, one vote’.
"The united opposition and every voter in the country demand a clean and transparent voter list. And, we will secure this right at all costs," Gandhi claimed in a post on X later.
Gandhi had on Thursday cited data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls to claim that over 1 lakh votes were "stolen" through five types of manipulation in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka. He alleged there were 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or single-address voters, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters misusing Form 6 of new voters.