Court rejects Chandy’s petition to restrain VS Achuthanandan

In a setback to chief minister Oommen Chandy ahead of the impending assembly election, the second additional sessions judge in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday rejected his plea to restrain opposition leader V S Achuthanandan from making defamatory statements against him during election campaigns.
Chandy had made the plea through an interim application filed during the hearing of defamation suit he filed against Achuthanandan.Judge A Badharudeen, who is in charge of vacation court, held that restraining the opposition leader was an encroachment on his right to point out flaws in the administration.
“In view of this matter, I am not inclined to allow this petition,” Badharudeen said. The judge further held that the interim application was rejected on the technical ground that the plea in the interim application was not mentioned in the original suit, that is, the defamation suit.
He also observed that the order should not be seen as a shield of adjudication of Chandy's defamation suit. "The allegations and proof pertaining to this case shall remain to be opened to be adjudicated by both parties by convincing evidence during trial and this court never observed that the allegations are either true or false,'' the judge held.
Chandy had filed a defamation suit against Achuthanandan on April 28 before the vacation court here seeking compensation of Rs 1 lakh for false allegations, made during a campaign rally, that the former faced as many as 31 corruption cases.
The next day when first additional sessions judge K P Indira, who was holding charge of the vacation court then, considered his petition, Chandy's counsel filed an interim application seeking to restrain Achuthanandan. However, the judge slammed the move with strong words and held that court must not be made a platform for playing politics. Achuthanandan's counsel had produced a list of 31 cases in which Chandy was involved before the court on Thursday.
Though the plaintiff's counsel argued that all complaints pending before courts and investigation agencies could not be considered as cases, the defendant's counsel countered it by stating that in layman's point of view all matters pending before courts were cases and Achuthanandan meant nothing else. On Friday his counsel Cherunniyoor Sasidharan Nair repeated that VS never said that any FIR or charge sheet existed against Chandy.
District government pleader A Santhosh Kumar represented Oommen Chandy as a private counsel in the case. V S Achuthanandan termed the court order as a slap on the face of Oommen Chandy. ''The court observed that restraining the opposition leader would be an encroachment to his right to point out the flaws in the administration. This implies that Chandy's move to restrain me was an attempt to sabotage the democratic system existing here,'' VS said in a statement issued here.