MUTHUVELAYDHA PERUMAL APPAVU Vs. R.M.BABU MURUGAVEL

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The petitioner herein is the present Speaker of the Tamilnadu State Assembly. He is also the sitting MLA elected from Radhapuram consitutuency as a candidate of DMK party. The respondent is former Member of the State Assembly and present Joint Secretary, Legal Wing of AIADMK party. The speech of the petitioner on 21/11/2023 at Chennai in a book release function is the subject matter of the private complaint for the offence under Ss. 499 r/w 500 of IPC filed by the respondent. The Special Court at Chennai for cases against MP and MLA had taken cognizance and issued summons to the petitioner. The complaint is impugned in this petition to quash on the following grounds:-

(2.) The Learned Senior Counsel for the petitioner relying on the judgements of this court rendered in Tamilisai Soundararajan -vs- Dhadi K. Karthikeyan reported in [2021 (3) MWN (Crl.) 159] and Maridass -vs- S.R.S.Umari Shankar reported in [] submitted that, the respondent is a person neither affected by the slandeours speech nor authorised to file complaint by the person/organisation aggrieved by the slanderous speech, hence, he cannot maintain a defamation complaint.

(3.) Referring the speech of the petitioner, the Learned Senior Counsel submitted that the complainant had cherry picked a part of the speech to mislead. The speech of the petitioner relates to an event happened few years ago when the AIADMK party lost its Leader and struggling with in-fight. At that time, the complainant was not in AIADMK party and he cannot claim any knowledge about, what transpired at that point of time within the AIADMK party.