VELLORE: Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) has demanded that the State government remove Justice Raghupathy from the enquiry commission that has been set up to probe the Moulivakkam building collapse incident at Chennai.
Party founder Dr Ramadoss made the demand while addressing a group of reporters here on Saturday. He said Justice Raghupathy was already a member of eight other enquiry commissions all appointed by the State government. While numerous retired judges, who would be unbiased, were available, PMK is of the opinion that Raghupathy would only be supporting the State government and the probe would not be fair. Instead his party would prefer a CBI enquiry into the incident to bring out the nexus between ministers and realtors and how overlooking of rules and regulations had resulted in the tragedy, he added.
Every time Jayalalithaa came to power, many incidences of deaths due to overlooking of rules and regulations had happened, Ramadoss claimed. According to him, in 1992, 300 people died in the Mahamagam stampede in Kumabakonam, while 30 died at Ervadi fire incident in 2001, 54 died at a marriage hall in Srirangam in 2004, 94 died in a fire accident in Kumbakonam in the same year. These deaths were due to negligence of rules and regulations and failure of the government machinery, he added.
Ramadoss said his party would soon be organising agitations across the State demanding the government to reintroduce the ballot paper system in the elections as complaints had emerged about electronic voting machines being vulnerable to certain chips that could be operated with mobile phones remotely to decide a voter’s choice. He said studies undertaken by Mexican University and a private company in Hyderabad had proved the possibility of tampering the EVMs with mobile phones. Six out of the eight countries in the European Union have reverted to ballot voting and England has also discarded the EVMs to go back to ballot paper system, he argued.
He said his party welcomed the petition submitted by DMK to the President of India regarding irregularities in the general election and he requested DMK to go to court as PMK would soon be seeking legal remedy against EVMs.
