The Supreme Court on Friday refused to advance the hearing of the contempt petition filed by the AIADMK seeking adequate punishment against Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Karunanidhi, Union Minister T R Baalu, State Minister K N Nehru and 3 state top bureaucrats for disobeying September 30 order and forcing a bundh in the state.

A bench headed by Justice B N Agrawal said, “'What is the urgency. The matter would come up for hearing on October 29.”

“We are yet to go through the petition. We are yet to apply our mind,” the court said, adding that it would decide whether a case of contempt was made out or not.

The petition filed on October 4 by Advocate Subramanium Prasad urged the court also to initiate contempt proceedings against Chief Secretary L K Tripathy, Director General of Police P Rajendran and Transport Secretary Debendranath Sarangi for alleged deliberate and willful violation of the court order, and closing the public transport, market, schools and colleges etc.

“Members of the DMK made various inflammatory and contumacious speeches. The tone of the speeches was to defy the order of the Apex Court,”said the petition.

Citing evidence, the petition said that only 61 of the 18641 buses of the state road transport department plied on the roads and earned few lakhs of rupees against daily average earning of Rs 10.43 crore.

In an extraordinary sitting on a Sunday due to urgency of the matter, the court had banned the strike (bundh) proposed by the Tamil Nadu government for demanding early completion of the Sethusamudram shipping canal project between India and Sri Lanka. The court had declared the proposed bundh “unconstitutional and violative of the apex court’s directive on the issue.”