Setting aside a lower court order discharging former Union minister M K Alagiri, the estranged elder brother of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin, in a 2014 land grab case, the Madras High Court on Tuesday ordered that he face trial afresh.
Allowing a criminal revision petition of Anti-Land Grab Cell Police of Madurai, challenging the discharge of Alagiri from certain provisions pertaining to cheating and forgery, Justice P Velmurugan directed that the former Union Minister should face prosecution for all the charges pressed against him.
The judge also dismissed Alagiri’s plea to discharge him in toto.
The Anti-Land Grab Cell, Madurai, had booked the case on a complaint of encroaching a temple land measuring up to 44 cents adjoining the engineering college run by the MK Alagiri Educational Trust at Sivarakottai near Thirumangalam in Madurai district.
The land belonged to the Vinayakar temple and the FIR was registered during the AIADMK regime.
Acting on a discharge petition filed by Alagiri, a Judicial Magistrate in 2021, had discharged him from the charges of cheating, forgery and illegal use of forged documents.
However, the Magistrate ordered that Alagiri should face the charges under Sections 120 B (criminal conspiracy), and 408 (criminal breach of trust) of the IPC. Alagiri filed an appeal before the Principal and District Sessions Court in Madurai. However, when the Anti-Land Grab Cell’s revision plea came up before Justice N Anand Venkatesh in 2023, he ordered that it should be clubbed with the appeal of the former Minister before the Sessions Court as both were interconnected.
On his direction, the former Minister’s plea was transferred to the High Court and the registry renumbered it in 2024 and tagged it with the revision petition. It then came up before Justice Velmurugan, when he took over the portfolio of cases pertaining to MPs and MLAs.
Ever since he was expelled from the party in 2014, when the patriarch M Karunanidhi was alive, for his slanderous attack on the DMK’s first family, especially Stalin, rapprochement has been elusive till now.