Top court favours reviving TMC's plea in High Court

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday favoured reviving a plea of Trinamool Congress (TMC) party alleging irregularities and unabated violence during recently concluded Tripura civic polls before the High Court, saying it had intervened only to ensure peaceful elections.

A bench of Justices DY Chandrachud, Surya Kant, and Vikram Nath said that now the election process is complete and the result has been declared, the allegations of irregularities and violence can be dealt with by the Tripura High Court. Since the electoral process is complete, we will revive your (TMC) writ petition before the High Court, which will consider your residuary prayers," the bench said.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Tripura government, pointed out that a writ petition was pending before the High Court, in which they had identical prayers. This court had taken up the plea of the party because at that time High Court was in recess but what was not told to this court was the fact that they themselves have sought adjournment of their petition for listing after the recess. The High Court was to open on November 11 but on November 9, they had moved the top court , he said.

They suppressed the facts and misled the court saying they were compelled to invoke Article 32 jurisdiction to approach this court as the High Court was in recess. Their writ petition was dismissed as not pressed after this court on November 11, passed a detailed order , he said. Mehta pointed out that a similar petition related to West Bengal poll violence came before the top court but then it had sent it back to the Calcutta High Court, which is looking into it.

The bench said, The reason why this court intervened was because our concern was that the election process must take place peacefully. We intervened only as the interest of free and fair elections in the democracy is of such overall importance that we felt that the Supreme Court should not have wasted any time. The circumstances why we assumed jurisdiction was peculiar to the situation .

It added that they might have withdrawn their writ petition before the High Court as they cannot have a second bite of the cherry . Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing on behalf of TMC, said that despite the court passing detailed orders with directions to the state home secretary, DGP, and police, unfortunately, 112 seats went uncontested.

This is situation is similar to West Bengal Panchayat elections, where your party is in power and seats went uncontested. Identical allegations were made against your party. We remember our 2018 judgement, where then Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A M Khanwilkar, and myself had passed orders certain sweeping directions of Calcutta High Court, where it has allowed filing of nomination papers through e-mails, Justice Chandrachud said.