The Madras high court has castigated a caste organisation which sought to ban publication of a Tamil daily and a biweekly saying they had infringed on the privacy of family members of P Ramkumar, who is charged with murder of software engineer S Swathi on June 24, merely because the accused belonged to a scheduled caste community.

"The petitioner Madurai Mavatta Devendrakula Velalar Uravinmurai Sangam, a caste association, seeks to rake up the issue on caste basis rather than the social aspect of the crime," observed the first bench of Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice R Mahadevan, holding that it was not fit to be treated as a PIL.