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The Madras High court on Tuesday, September 2, appointed retired judge Justice V Parthiban to head a one-man commission to probe allegations of police excess during the dispersal of Greater Chennai Corporation conservancy workers. The workers had been staging a protest outside Ripon Buildings demanding a rollback of the privatisation of solid waste management in Zones V (Royapuram) and VI (Thiru Vi Ka Nagar).
The order was passed by a Division Bench of Justices MS Ramesh and V Lakshminarayanan while hearing a habeas corpus petition filed by advocate S Vijay, who challenged the arrest of four fellow lawyers — K Bharathi, K Suresh, Mohan Babu and R Raj Kumar — along with two law students, Muthuselvan and Valarmathi. They were taken into custody during a late-night police action between August 13 and 14.
The Bench said a neutral inquiry was essential to “cull out the truth” amid conflicting claims from the police and the detainees.
Justice V Parthiban of the Madras High Court retired from service in April 2022. In September 2023, he headed a one‑man commission to determine fair compensation for the families of 32 victims who died in a tragic cracker shop fire in Pallipattu.
He had enrolled with Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry in 1986. After 30 years of standing in the Bar, he was elevated as a judge of the High Court in 2016.
The court had earlier, on August 14, taken a prima facie view that arrests were unlawful and ordered the release of the detainees without remand. However, during subsequent hearings, the Bench pressed the State on whether it would consider dropping criminal cases against the advocates and students. Additional Advocate General J Ravindran opposed the move, arguing that such a step would wrongly suggest lawyers were above the law.
However, counsels of the petitions argued that the police had intentionally assaulted the detainees, pointing to medical records as proof of custodial violence. They maintained that the arrests were carried out at night to suppress the conservancy workers’ agitation against outsourcing of sanitation work in Chennai’s Royapuram and Thiru Vi Ka Nagar zones.
The workers’ protest had been ongoing for nearly 13 days outside the Ripon building before the High Court, led then by Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava, directed the State on August 13 to remove the demonstrators, citing lack of permission. The subsequent police action, however, escalated into clashes involving workers, lawyers, and law students.