NEW DELHI: Senior Congress leader and the only Muslim parliamentarian from Gujarat,
Ahmed Patel, has moved the
Supreme Court seeking dismissal of an election petition filed against him in the high court challenging his narrow victory in Rajya Sabha polls in August last year.
Patel won the RS election along with BJP’s Amit Shah and Smriti Irani on August 8 last year amid high drama. Prior to the polls, Congress chief whip Balwantsinh Rajput resigned from his party, joined BJP and filed nomination. It was followed by the resignation of five Congress MLAs, and eight more openly rebelled. Congress cried foul about the use of money power and took its 44 MLAs to Bengaluru. With cross-voting done openly, it was an anxious 24 hours before Patel scraped through to the RS for the fifth time.
Immediately after Patel got elected, Rajput filed a petition in the HC challenging the Election Commission’s decision to invalidate votes of two rebel MLAs saying if those two votes had been counted, he would have defeated Patel. He also accused Congress of ‘exercising undue influence over its MLAs and denying them the opportunity to vote according to their “conscience”.
The Gujarat HC had asked Rajput to remove EC as a respondent. However, Patel challenged maintainability of Rajput’s petition and said it failed to comply with important technical requirements under Section 80 of the Representation of People Act. Patel’s grievances against the petition was that the copy filed in the HC and the one supplied to him by Rajput had as many as 20 differences, which according to the Congress leader was fatal in an election petition.
However, the HC had rejected his plea and ordered Rajput’s election petition to be taken up for trial. The HC said the petitioner has substantially complied with the provisions of law and the defects could be easily cured. Challenging this order, Patel moved the SC on Friday. His petition, drafted by advocate Devadatt Kamat and filed by Gautam Talukdar, sought cancellation of the summons issued to him by the HC.
