The Madras High Court has decided to entertain a petition submitted by Amrutha Sarathy, a Bengaluru woman claiming to be late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa’s daughter.
Amrutha had approached the court asking for a DNA test to be conducted to validate her claim. She has also asked that Jayalalithaa, who lies buried at the Marina beach in Chennai, be cremated according to customary Brahmin rituals.
Senior counsel Prakash, appearing for Amrutha Sarathy, requested the court to take up the case as an urgent matter and conduct a speedy hearing of the same. Justice Vaidyanathan, who accepted Amrutha’s petition, said he would take it up for hearing on Thursday afternoon.
Earlier in November, the Supreme Court had refused to hear a similar petition filed by her. In her petition, Amrutha had said that she knew Jayalalithaa as her elder aunt and it was only in March, three months after Jayalalithaa’s demise that it was revealed to her that she was, in fact, Jayalalithaa’s daughter.
As Jayalalithaa had fostered only one son in her lifetime, Amrutha’s claim was met with raised eyebrows. However, acknowledging this, she had claimed in her petition that an understanding was reached between Jayalalithaa and her aunts (who revealed the “truth” to her) in order to “uphold the dignity of the family as they belong to a very religious, orthodox and cultured Brahmin family.”
In her petition, Amrutha says that three months after she was born in Bengaluru in August 1980, Sandhya, Jayalalithaa’s mother had made a woman named Shylaja adopt Amrutha as her own daughter.
In an interview to Junior Vikatan in 2014, Shylaja herself had claimed that she is the third sibling born to Sandhya and Jayaram, with Jayalalithaa being the eldest and Jayakumar the middle child. “I was a three-month-old foetus when my father died. My mother entered films and gave me to art director Damodar Pillai's son, who raised me,” Shylaja told JV.
In a startling claim, Amrutha says that Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam knows that she is Jayalalithaa’s daughter.
Interestingly, when the Supreme Court had asked Amrutha, 37, why she had not gone to the Madras HC instead, her counsel at the time, Indira Jaisingh said that Amrutha feared danger to her life given the fragile political situation in the state. Hence, Justice Madan B. Lokur had given her relief to approach to Karnataka High Court.
Speaking to TNM, senior lawyer Sudha Ramalingam said, “Without prima facie evidence, a writ petition cannot be admissible in court. Else, a civil suit should be filed seeking for a declaration of parentage. ”