All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and its general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami have filed a joint petition before the Madras High Court urging it to review an order passed on December 4, 2024 in a case related to a representation made against the party before the Election Commission of India (ECI).

A Division Bench of Justices R. Subramanian and C. Kumarappan on Thursday condoned the delay of six days in filing the review petition, after hearing the arguments advanced by senior counsel Vijay Narayan assisted by K. Gowtham Kumar, and directed the Registry to list the plea for hearing next week after numbering it.

The review petition, along with the application to condone the delay of six days, was filed in the Registry on January 24, 2025 but got listed for hearing only on Thursday. The order sought to be reviewed now was passed in a writ petition filed by an individual named S. Surya Moorthi in 2024.

The writ petitioner had made a representation to the ECI on February 12, 2024 for freezing the ‘two leaves’ election symbol and sought a direction to the commission to conduct an inquiry on the basis of his representation and then take necessary action as he had prayed for.

The Bench led by Justice Subramanian had disposed of the writ petition on December 4, 2024 after recording the submission made by ECI counsel Niranjan Rajagopalan that the commission had already issued notices to the parties concerned and that it would dispose of the representation within four weeks.

However, in its review petition, AIADMK argued that the ECI did not even have the jurisdiction to entertain such a representation when there was no split in the party and therefore, it ought not to have told the court that it would take a decision on the issue within four weeks.

Mr. Narayan said after the filing of the present review petition on January 24, 2025; the Division Bench had passed interim orders on a batch of similar writ petitions on February 12, 2025 making it clear that the orders passed in a batch of civil suits, regarding party affairs, would be binding upon the ECI.

In the February 25, 2025 interim order, the Bench had also ordered that the ECI must first determine its jurisdiction to entertain the representations before getting into the merits of the matter. Therefore, the order passed in Surya Moorthi’s petition must necessarily be reviewed since the commission had assumed jurisdiction after that order, Mr. Narayan added.