Naadorum naadi murai seyya mannavan,/Naadorum naadu kedum (when a king fails to assess his rule day by day and set right all irregularities, the country will slowly deteriorate). A quotation from Thirukkural, couplets by Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar, came in handy for the DMK against the AIADMK during the 1996 Tamil Nadu assembly elections. This was not a mere recitation of a verse by DMK president M. Karunanidhi to bring down arch rival, AIADMK General Secretary J. Jayalalithaa, who faced one of her worst defeats that year. The lines were part of a severe indictment of the Jayalalithaa regime by Madras High Court Justice M. Srinivasan, who had the habit of quoting from Thirukkural in his major judgments. It was gleefully used by Jayalalithaa’s rivals in their road shows more than a decade ago.

Over the years, it also set a trend. Scathing court observations were increasingly used in campaigns against opponents. Judicial observations emboldened political rivals to approach the courts for redress as a means of delegitimising the ruling party. Jayalalithaa’s political opponents filed a slew of corruption cases against her during her first tenure as CM. Janata Party president, Subramanian Swamy, led the queue with his petition under the Prevention of Corruption Act in the 1997 SPIC disinvestment case, in which the government was accused of divesting the SPIC shares and causing a loss of about Rs 28 crore to the exchequer. The series of court judgments against her regime during 1991-96 proved to be the catalyst for her downfall in the following state election.

More recently, Jayalalithaa got sweet revenge. On October 1, when the ruling DMK and allies observed a hunger strike on the Sethusamudram issue, the state machinery came to a standstill making a mockery of the government’s claim that it had given up on the bandh following the Supreme Court order. This prompted Justice B.N. Agarwal to pass strong oral strictures even carrying suggestions of dismissal. Justice Agarwal’s scathing observations are sure to resonate in street corners during the next elections in Tamil Nadu.

There have been other occasions too when court observations became political fodder. In last year’s assembly election, DMK Chief Karunanidhi repeatedly read from newspaper articles on the Madras High Court verdict upholding an economic offences court order declining to discharge income tax cases against Jayalalithaa and her friend, Sasikala Natarajan. Karunanidhi, quoting liberally the judge’s observations, pointed out that Jayalalithaa as CM, had “failed to act as a role model for people to follow” by not filing her income tax for the year 1993-94. When she did not reply to Income Tax Department summons, the latter moved the Supreme Court, which observed that “Jayalalithaa was making a mockery of the judicial process”. It was this that Karunanidhi happily highlighted.

While Subramanian Swamy popularised the idea of leaders going to court against their opponents, it was the DMK which set the trend of seeking court redress for personal complaints. Senior DMK leader R. Shanmugasundaram filed a petition in the TANSI case against Jayalalithaa in 1998. Since then a long list of corruption cases were filed against her by her opponents. For instance, in November 2003, DMK General Secretary K. Anbazhagan filed a transfer petition in the Supreme Court to get the wealth case against Jayalalithaa, then CM, transferred to Bangalore.

In 2002, DMK MP C. Kuppusamy filed a PIL against Jayalalithaa seeking prosecution against her for false declaration while filing her nomination papers in four constituencies in the May 2001 assembly elections. Based on a petition filed by Jayalalithaa, the SC on July 10 this year ordered status quo with regard to two cases filed by the Election Commission against her in Bhuvanagiri and Pudukottai.

Following the violence in the Chennai civic polls last December, the AIADMK and DMK’s own allies, the Left parties, went to court, seeking re-election. When the case came up before a division bench in the Madras High Court, Justice Ibrahim Kalifulla described the violent incidents as “an extraordinary situation warranting an extraordinary remedy”. The judge flayed the state election commissioner for “behaving in a highly irresponsible manner” in not using his powers to stop the violence. Jayalalithaa and her party colleagues did not fail to recall the observations at public meetings.

In anticipation of snap polls, political parties virtually queued up before the courts against opponents. The state BJP has threatened to move the court against Chief Minister Karunanidhi for “hurting religious sentiments” with his anti-Ram statements. The ruling DMK, for its part, has encouraged a local panchayat leader in Kodanadu to file a petition in the local court against Jayalalithaa for alleged violations in the construction of ‘a palatial bungalow’ in her estates there. Call this the politics of going to courts, but in TN the trend has come to stay.