New Delhi: The INDIA bloc – Congress and Samajwadi Party – is going to launch a legal battle after the nomination of its official candidate in Madhya Pradesh’s Khajuraho seat was rejected on ‘flimsy’ technical grounds by the returning officer. The opposition has accused the administration and the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state of foul play and said the two technical grounds cited for the rejection of the papers could have been easily corrected during scrutiny.
If the INDIA bloc does not get any relief from either the Madhya Pradesh high court or the Supreme Court, it will zero in on one of the independent candidates and support him or her, K.K Mishra, a senior Congress spokesperson told The Wire. The Khajuraho constituency, made up of parts of Katni, Panna and Chhatarpur districts in north-east of MP, votes on April 26.
Vishnu Dutt Sharma, the BJP’s president in MP, is the sitting Member of Parliament from Khajuraho and also the candidate for the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
Khajuraho, one of the 29 seats in the state, was poised for a three-way contest, between the BJP, the INDIA-bloc and the Bahujan Samaj Party, till Meera Deepak Yadav’s nomination was rejected on April 5. Yadav, a former legislator, was fighting on a SP symbol as a joint candidate of INDIA.
While Meera Yadav was unavailable for comment, her husband and SP leader Deep Narayan Yadav told media that the nomination papers were rejected by the returning officer citing two reasons. First, the certified copy of the voter list attached by Yadav was old. Second, she had not signed the document at a particular place.
Deep Narayan said that when they submitted the papers on April 4, the last day of filing nomination for the second phase of general elections, the technical shortcomings were not pointed out.
“The rules say that if there is some deficiency while filing nomination, and even if the candidate is an illiterate person, it is the responsibility of the election officer and other concerned officials to correct it,” he said.
Also read: Five Reasons There’s a Dark Cloud Over Election Commission’s Transparency and Functioning
Deep Narayan argued that had the election officer asked them to submit a fresh voter list in place of the one submitted, it could have been easily arranged before the end of scrutiny of the papers on April 5.
Akhilesh Yadav, SP national president, said the rejection of Meera Yadav’s nomination amounted to a “blatant murder of democracy,” and demanded that a judicial inquiry be held into the matter.
Akhilesh Yadav asked that if the nomination papers did not carry Meera Yadav’s signature why did the inspecting officer accept the form. Referring to the controversial Chandigarh mayoral polls, in which the polling officer Anil Masih unlawfully invalidated AAP votes to benefit the BJP, Akhilesh Yadav asked, “Those who can cheat in front of the court’s camera, what kind of conspiracies must they be hatching behind the back after getting the form?”
On April 6, INDIA bloc partners, including the state presidents of the AAP, Congress and the SP, held a meeting in Bhopal to discuss the legal remedy and electoral strategy over the Khajuraho crisis.
K.K Mishra told The Wire that they were still discussing the legal options and were prepared to approach both the HC and the SC. “This was done to give an advantage to V.D Sharma,” said Mishra.
He also clarified that the INDIA bloc would not lend support to the BSP candidate Kamlesh Patel but rather back an independent candidate. “Our main goal is to fight the BJP,” he said.
Mishra stressed that the Opposition candidate’s nomination was rejected on trivial grounds such as a signature. On the other hand, he said, the Election Commission of India had last year allowed the candidature of senior BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya even after the Congress had accused him of concealing information about two pending criminal cases, including one related to a gang rape in West Bengal.
The INDIA bloc feels that the rejection of the nomination of its candidate in Khajuraho raised larger questions on the sanctity of the general elections rather than just being the case of one particular constituency, which, if past records are to be relied upon, seems out of reach.
Khajuraho has been a BJP stronghold. Senior BJP leader and former chief minister Uma Bharti won it four consecutive times in 1989, 1991, 1996 and 1998. The Congress candidate Satyavrat Chaturvedi, the son of a former two-time MP Vidyawati Chaturvedi, ended the BJP’s streak in 1999. But in the last four elections – 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019 – the BJP won from Khajuraho with a different candidate each time.
Jitu Patwari, Congress MP President, in a press conference on April 6, directly accused MP Chief Minister Mohan Yadav of instructing the Panna Collector, the returning officer, to reject Meera Yadav’s nomination.
“A Yadav CM got the form of a Yadav woman candidate of the Samajwadi Party cancelled through the collector,” Patwari said. “This is a message that the country is moving towards dictatorship,” he said. Patwari also demanded “a prompt and effective” high-level judicial probe into the matter and said that those guilty of the “crime of democracy,” by cancelling the nomination papers, must be punished immediately.
In 2019, the BJP won 28 out of 29 seats in MP. This time, the party is going all out with its ‘Mission 29’ in a bid to sweep the state. It will be an uphill task for the Opposition in the central Indian state as in 2019, the BJP had secured an average vote share of an insurmountable 58% across the state. In 14 seats, the BJP candidate’s vote percentage crossed 60%. The BJP defeated the Congress by 4.92 lakh votes in Khajuraho.
The thinnest margin of victory anywhere in the state in 2019 was in Chhindwara where the Congress candidate Nakul Nath, son of former chief minister Kamal Nath, defeated the BJP by less than 38,000 votes.
