The DMK has moved the Madras High Court seeking permission to initiate defamation proceedings against Tamil Nadu ministers Nirmal Kumar and Aadhav Arjuna, along with the TVK's IT wing, over public statements accusing the previous DMK government of covering up a POCSO case against granite industrialist R. Veeramani. The petition was filed by DMK general secretary Duraimurugan, who argued that the ministers' remarks had caused real damage to the party's reputation.
Alongside the case against the ministers, the DMK has also sought the court's permission to proceed against Meta, YouTube and X within its jurisdiction, asking for restraint on content it considers defamatory and tied to the same controversy. The High Court, hearing the matter on Friday, went further and restrained media outlets and social media platforms from publishing or circulating videos connected to the Veeramani case altogether, while directing both the ministers and the platforms to respond before adjourning the matter to September 28.
The underlying dispute traces back to a POCSO investigation that began in October 2025, after a child rights activist approached police with a pen drive she said contained visuals of a minor girl being sexually assaulted. The probe drew criticism after it emerged that Chennai police had moved to close the case in February this year, just months after opening it, a sequence that has since become the flashpoint of the political row. Investigators have since widened the inquiry, identifying additional alleged victims and examining claims that the abuse may have stretched back over two decades.
TVK ministers have accused the DMK administration then in power of shielding Veeramani by allowing the case to be shut down, a charge the DMK firmly rejects, with the party maintaining the investigation was deferred over insufficient evidence rather than deliberately buried. DMK president and former Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has personally denied the cover-up allegations, calling them reprehensible slander, and noted that similar complaints against Veeramani had surfaced as far back as 2013 under a different government, as well as again in 2025 during the DMK's own tenure.
With the Madras High Court having urged both the ministers and DMK leaders not to turn the POCSO case into a political football, the coming hearing on September 28 is likely to determine how far the defamation proceedings can go, even as the underlying investigation into Veeramani continues to widen independent of the legal battle over who gets to characterise its handling.