Harassment from association to pay unreasonable fines

Dear Sir,

We need an opinion from you regarding the harassment that we are facing now from our association.I am staying at Chennai in an old apartments of age more than 25 years. Recently our association has increased the maintenance charges stating the reason as unable to bear the maintenance expenses. But this was decided in the general body meeting with the attendance of  7 to 8 members out of 19(total members) and usually they won’t allow other members(owners) to raise issues in meeting and they will  also immediately suppress our voices if anyone of us ask or raise any questions. So most of the owners will not usually come for the meeting and will accept the decision taken in the meeting after seeing the MOM. This time we sent a letter to the association to reconsider the decision stating some valid reasons and told them that we were ready to pay the old amount till the discussion is over. I sent two letters but for that association have not provided any reply till today and not showed interest to discuss this matter at all and also they refused to accept the old amount and told us they can only accept the revised amount with fine as Rs.500/-every month in full. This has happened during March 2014 and we changed our decision later and we were ready to pay the amount to them by April and also asked the watchman to accept the amount to get receipt. They refused to accept the amount without fine. They said they can only accept the maintenance with penalty as Rs.500/-every month. We told them we were ready to pay them full amount but not with the penalty. This has been a new procedure recently introduced without approval from majority of owners. Every month from April, we have been requesting them to accept the amount but they are not ready to accept without fine for the maintenance (Rs.800) as Rs.500/-They are also accumulating the fine till today for us. I also sent several letters to them stating that we are ready pay the full maintenance and also requested other owners to intervene. Moreover, in the last meeting when owners asked the board members to register the association and they said they are not interested to do that because they need to handle accounts and verify with auditor every year and this will be cumbersome for them. They later dropped the request completely for registration. Our secretary is behaving vey adamant and not ready to accept any request. What can we do to make the association to accept the maintenance? Moreover, we see the fines are also not reasonable and that’s why we didn’t paid that to close this issue. Some of the owners are mentioned comments about these unreasonable demands from association. They are now projecting us as defaulter of maintenance charges even though we are ready to pay the maintenance in full. Kindly suggest an solution.

Regards,

KrishnaKumar