The Election Commission has sought responses from AIADMK General Secretary VK Sasikala and her deputy TTV Dinakaran to a petition filed by E Madhusudhanan and others seeking allotment of the ‘two leaves’ symbol to former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister O Panneerselvam’s faction of the party.
Late on Friday, news agency PTI reported that the Commission would take a decision on the issue on March 22.
The ‘two leaves’ is the official symbol of the AIADMK. Sasikala and Dinakaran have been given until March 20 to respond.
A final decision by the Commission on the issue is crucial both for factions of the party as whichever faction wins the symbol could gain an upper hand in the RK Nagar bypolls that are scheduled to be held on April 12 this year.
The polls have been necessitated following the death of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, who represented the constituency in the State Assembly. Since Jayalalithaa’s death in December last year, a bitter factional war has broken out between the OPS and Sasikala factions over which of the two is the real AIADMK. Though OPS was sworn in as Chief Minister following Jayalalithaa’s death, he resigned to facilitate Sasikala’s elevation to the top post. He, however, rebelled later.
And while Sasikala was elected to lead the AIADMK Legislature Party, she could not be CM as the Supreme Court had by then held her guilty in a disproportionate assets case and sentenced to a four-year jail term.
In February , a day before Sasikala surrendered to a Special Court to begin her jail term in Bengaluru, she appointed her nephew Dinakaran as the party’s Deputy General Secretary. The appointment was opposed by the OPS group which moved the EC against Dinakaran’s elevation.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that the Sasikala faction has had a run-in with the Commission.
In its communication to Sasikala and Dinakaran, the Commission had pointed out that it had received five different communications from the latter in response to three missives to the party. These had to do with the OPS faction’s demand that Sasikala’s election as AIADMK General Secretary be declared illegal as the party’s Constitution had no provisions to pick an interim General Secretary. They also wanted the Commission to invalidate all appointments made by Sasikala.