New Delhi: A ‘mismatch’ in the election affidavit of senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jugal Kishore, who is the sitting MP of the Jammu Lok Sabha constituency, has triggered a row with a senior advocate approaching the Election Commission of India (ECI) over the issue.
The disclosure assumes significance amid the ECI’s decision to reject the nomination papers of Nilesh Kumbhani, the Congress candidate from Gujarat’s Surat Lok Sabha constituency, where the BJP’s Mukesh Dalal was elected unopposed – without contest – on April 21 after three of Kumbhani’s proposers denied that they signed his nomination papers.
Rohit Choudhary, a Jammu-based leader of the National Conference, said that he has also filed an RTI application on April 24 with the ECI over the changes in Kishore’s affidavit.
“I am waiting for a reply from the commission,” he said.
Kishore, who has scored two consecutive victories from the Jammu Lok Sabha constituency, is pitted against the INDIA bloc’s Raman Kumar Bhalla.
The election to the constituency is set to be held on Friday (April 26).
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
In a complaint on April 4 to IAS officer Sachin Kumar Vaishya, who is also the returning officer (RO) of the Jammu Lok Sabha constituency, senior lawyer Sheikh Shakeel Ahmad alleged that there was a mismatch between the affidavit Kishore filed in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and the one for the upcoming election.
Speaking to The Wire, Ahmad, who is based in Jammu, said that Kishore had disclosed in his 2019 affidavit that he was one of the promotors of Himgari Infrastructure Development Private Ltd, a Jammu-based company that is involved in the construction sector.
He said that Kishore had signed up as one of the guarantors for a Rs 30 crore loan, which the company had availed from the J&K Bank’s Link Road branch in Jammu for financing a three-megawatt hydropower project in Himachal Pradesh’s Chamba.
According to the 2019 affidavit, Kishore had disclosed that his liability towards banks and other financial institutions stood at Rs 34.53 crore.
However, in his current affidavit, Kishore has said that the liability stands at only Rs 20.42 lakhs.
Ahmad said that Kishore was bound by law to explain the “drastic change” in the new affidavit.
“The returning officer at the time of scrutiny in terms of Section 36 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 was under a legal obligation to explain the mismatch. However, he didn’t act on my complaint and accepted the nomination paper of Kishore without any explanation,” Ahmad told The Wire.
Section 36 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 deals with the filing of the nomination papers by candidates, their examination by all candidates contesting from the particular electoral constituency and the powers of the returning officer.
“The returning officer shall … examine the nomination papers and shall decide all objections which may be made to any nomination and may, either on such objection or on his own motion, after such summary inquiry, if any, as he thinks necessary, reject any nomination…”, sub-section 2 of section 36 states.
The last date for filing nomination papers for the Jammu Lok Sabha constituency was April 4 and the papers were scrutinised on April 6, two days after Ahmad’s complaint.
“When I approached the returning officer for clarification on April 7, he told me to go to court. On April 12, I filed a 52-page complaint with P.K. Pole, the chief electoral officer of J&K, against the RO as he had failed to perform his duty, but there was no response from his office also,” he said.
Ahmad said that he then filed an application at Pole’s office under the Right to Information Act, seeking information about the action taken on his complaint.
“I got an email from Pole’s office that my complaint has been forwarded to the [ECI] for appropriate action,” Ahmad said.
Official documents reveal that Ahmad’s complaint has been sent by Pole’s office to B.C. Patra, a secretary in the ECI on April 15. However, there has been no response from the commission to the complaint so far.
