Chennai, Mar 15:
Tamil Nadu government has initiated criminal defamation proceedings against All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIDMK) general secretary and former chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami and Tamil Nadu state BJP unit president K Annamalai for making statements linking chief minister MK Stalin to recent Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) arrests in a drug haul case.
City public prosecutor G Devarajan, who filed a complaint on behalf of Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin, said that while Stalin had been taking serious steps to make Tamil Nadu drug-free, defamatory statements by leader of opposition Palaniswami in a recent interview attempted to falsely link the Tamil Nadu chief minister to distribution of contraband by aiding drug peddlers.
“Statements made by the accused at a press meet, which have come to be widely circulated on television and online media, are an attempt to discredit the credibility of the chief minister and to launch a smear campaign against him,” he claimed.
The complaint, filed before principal sessions court, Chennai, is likely to be taken up for hearing on Friday.
Any responsible person, upon receipt of an allegation of the present nature, which will have far-reaching implications, would have attempted to verify the truthiness of the allegation.
However, no such attempt has been made by the accused in the present case and he proceeded to publish the same in social media with an intention to defame the chief minister, the prosecutor added.
