The Madras High Court Chief Justice, Sanjay V. Gangapurwala, has constituted a three-judge bench comprising Justices D. Krishnakumar, C.V. Karthikeyan, and P. Dhanabal, to hear a writ petition filed in 2017 challenging a 2015 ban imposed by the State government on a Tamil book titled ‘Madurai Veeranin Unmai Varalaru’ (Madurai Veeran’s true story).
The special bench is slated to hear the case on Friday. The constitution of the three-judge Bench was necessitated in view of Section 96 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which states that an order of forfeiture passed under Section 95 of the Cr.P.C. could be challenged only before a special bench comprising three judges of the High Court concerned.
In the 2017 writ petition, the book’s author, Kulandai alias Kulandairaj, challenged a Government Order (GO) issued by the Home Department on August 19, 2015, for forfeiting all copies of the book published by Aadhi Tamizhar Thozhilalar Peravai on the ground that it contained certain offending portions that could incite public unrest.
