Case filed in Madras High Court seeking permission for BJP bike rally across Tamil Nadu on Independence Day

Madras High Court hears BJP petition for Independence Day bike rallies with national flag, challenging police denial.

A writ petition has been filed in the Madras High Court seeking permission for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cadres to conduct bike rallies, carrying the national flag, in various places across the State in order to celebrate the 78th Independence Day on Thursday.

Justice G. Jayachandran on Tuesday granted a day’s time for Government Advocate K.M.D. Muhilan to obtain necessary instructions but made it clear that permission could not be denied if the rallies could be conducted peacefully without public disturbance.

A. Krishna Prasath, Coimbatore district secretary of BJP Yuva Morcha, had filed the writ petition challenging an order passed by the Coimbatore Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) - North on August 10 denying permission for the motorcycle rally on multiple grounds.

The judge permitted the petitioner’s counsel R.C. Paul Kanagaraj to move a lunch motion seeking an urgent hearing of the case. Accordingly, when the matter was heard in the afternoon, the counsel accused the DCP of having cited contradictory reasons to deny permission.

The advocate said, the DCP had cited lack of proper information about the route of the rally as one of the reasons for passing the rejection order and on the contrary claimed that permission could not be granted also because of narrow roads and ongoing construction of flyovers.

Mr. Kanagaraj said, the BJP Tamil Nadu unit’s general secretary himself wanted to file a writ petition seeking permission for similar bike rallies across the State but the Registry refused to number it due to technical reasons. Hence, the Coimbatore office-bearer alone had filed the case.

The judge replied that any order to be passed by him in the present writ petition would apply to other police jurisdictions too and decided to hear the matter as the first case on Thursday.