Madras High Court reserves judgment on plea to defer bypolls in five Tamil Nadu constituencies

The Madras High Court on Thursday (October 1, 2026) reserved its judgment on a public interest litigation (PIL) petition that seeks to restrain the Election Commission of India (ECI) from notifying byelections in the Tiruchi East, Ambasamudram, Perundurai, Viralimalai, and Karur constituencies until the disposal of election petitions related to those constituencies.

The First Division Bench of Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G. Arul Murugan deferred their verdict after senior counsel Dama Sheshadri Naidu, assisted by ECI standing counsel Niranjan Rajagopalan, said that the role of the Commission in the present case was non-adversarial and that it would act in whichever way the court interprets the law.

When the judges asked whether the ECI had taken a decision either in favour of conducting the bypolls or against it, Mr. Naidu replied: “No MiLords. We have not taken any decision formally. Under Section 151A (of the Representation of the People Act, 1951), we have six months’ time. Before we could take the decision, the petitioner has knocked the doors of this court.”

The PIL petition was filed by K. Venkatachalapathy of Tirunelveli, through his counsel V.R. Shanmuganathan, who stated that the Tiruchi East constituency fell vacant because Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay had won from two seats and resigned from this seat after retaining Perambur. Pursuant to the resignation, DMK candidate S. Inigo Irudayaraj had filed an election petition challenging the Chief Minister’s victory from Tiruchi East.

The other four constituencies fell vacant because the MLAs had resigned. Nevertheless, election petitions had been filed in respect to all those four constituencies and hence, bypolls should not be conducted for them in order to avoid an anomalous situation of each of those constituencies being represented by two candidates if the election petitions get allowed after the conduct of bypolls, he argued.