Supreme Court upholds Azam son’s disqualification as MLA

NEW DELHI: Mohd Abdullah Azam Khan, son of powerful SP leader Azam Khan, would perhaps go down in Indian history as the only underage politician whose victory in the UP Assembly election was rescinded as he was only 24 years’ old at that time against statutory eligibility requirement of 25 years.
The Supreme Court bench of Justices caught junior Khan lying about his age and ruled through separate but concurrent judgments that the Allahabad HC had rightly quashed his election from Suar constituency in Rampur district finding that he had not reached the age of 25 years to contest the elections in 2017, being born on January 1, 1993.
The bench noticed that Abdullah Azam Khan had consistently maintained in the records of his school, college and passport that his date of birth is January 1, 1993. In 2015, his family decided that he should join politics , a Lucknow hospital was asked to provide a birth certificate showing the date as September 30, 1990.
The bench said she also had pleaded that her son’s birth certificate was urgently needed for “very important and unavoidable reasons” while enclosing her own affidavit. On such an application being furnished, within three days, “the birth certificate was issued by Nagar Nigam, Lucknow on January 21, 2015, indicating his date of birth as September 30, 1990, which could not have been ordinarily possible to obtain by the common man”.