'Texture changed': High Court puts Vijay's Perambur win under a harder lens

CHENNAI: The Madras High Court on Wednesday turned a technical plea into a question about what voters are owed. Hearing Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay's application to reject election petitions challenging his victory from Perambur, Justice V. Lakshminarayanan observed that the entire texture of the case had changed, and asked how Mr Vijay would overcome the Supreme Court's rulings on election disclosure.

The judge's central question was practical, not theatrical. If a candidate declares assets of around Rs 600 crore but leaves out assets worth about Rs 30 crore, can that omission amount to corrupt practice? The court also wondered whether the list was prepared by a chartered accountant rather than the candidate himself, and whether an accountant's miss should decide an election. A further question followed: would knowing about the missing Rs 30 crore have changed anything for a voter who had already decided to support Mr Vijay?

Those questions matter because the petitions are not about one form. Three election petitions are before the court, including one by voter S. Dinesh, another by voter T. N. Lakshmi Narasimhan, and one by DMK's losing candidate R. D. Shekar. Mr Vijay won Perambur by 53,715 votes. A separate petition by DMK candidate S. Inigo Irudayaraj challenges the Tiruchi East contest, which Mr Vijay vacated after winning from both seats.

Mr Vijay's counsel, senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, argued that minor discrepancies or errors in an affidavit do not amount to a failure to disclose, and that the petitioners have not shown how any error misled the electorate or materially affected the result. On that view, the case should end at the door. The petitioners' case is that disclosure duties are themselves part of a free and fair election, and cannot be weighed only after the winner is known.

No order deciding the challenge was announced in the reports of Wednesday's hearing. What the hearing did was narrow the dispute to its real issue: is an affidavit a promise to the voter, or is it paperwork that only matters when the loser can prove the winner's voters would have behaved differently? The court's answer will shape more than one constituency. Every candidate in Tamil Nadu files the same affidavit. If a Rs 30 crore gap inside a Rs 600 crore declaration is treated as a rounding error, future voters will have to ask what size of omission still counts as concealment.