Chennai:
Having won a hard-fought victory in the Supreme Court over the Governor’s assent to 10 pending bills, the DMK government in Tamil Nadu has suffered a setback in the Madras High Court on Wednesday over the powers to appoint vice-chancellors laid out in some of them.
On April 8, the Supreme Court had said Tamil Nadu Governor RN Ravi had not acted in good faith by withholding assent to 10 bills, each of which had been passed twice by the state legislature. Many of these bills clipped the powers of the governor in the appointment of vice chancellors to state-run universities.
A BJP functionary had filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the High Court claiming that the laws went against the regulations of the University Grants Commission (UGC) on the appointment of vice chancellors.
The disagreement is over whether the search committees for the appointment of vice chancellors should have a nominee of the UGC. The Tamil Nadu government has argued that the state universities are governed by their own statutory norms and don’t have to follow UGC guidelines on this issue.
The MK Stalin-led DMK government also said the Supreme Court is already hearing similar cases and a mention of them was made in the court on Wednesday morning. The government sought that the petition be tagged with those in the Supreme Court and it should be given time to respond.
The High Court, however, stayed the provisions in the new Acts which deal with the appointment of vice-chancellors.
In a landmark order on April 8, the Supreme Court had said the Governor’s withholding of the bills was “illegal” and he could not reserve the bills for the President after denying assent.
“These bills shall be deemed to be cleared from the date they were re-presented,” a bench of Justice SB Pardiwala and Justice R Mahadevan ruled.
The court laid down timelines for governors and also set a three-month deadline for the President to decide on bills reserved by governors. This led to Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar and some in the BJP accusing it of judicial overreach.
