The Karnataka High Court on Friday upheld the order of the City Civil Court, which had set aside the election of S. Shivashankar Prasad of the Bharatiya Janata Party as councillor of the A-Narayananapura (Ward No.56) of the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike.
Justice N. Ananda passed the order while dismissing the appeal filed by Mr. Prasad challenging the June 30 order of the 6th Additional City Civil and Sessions Court, Bangalore.
The High Court found that Mr. Prasad’s school certificate showed that he is a Sadari Gowda and his father’s caste certificate, issued by the tahsildar of Lepakshi Mandal in Andhra Pradesh, says he belongs to ‘Sadari-BC’. However, the latter certificate bears no date of issue. Further, the High Court found that the list of castes issued in 1995 by the State government to reserve the seats for the posts in the municipal corporations has entries indicating Hindu-Sadru/Sadaru but there are no synonyms or equivalent to this category of caste.
Defeated Congress candidate D.A. Gopala, who had challenged Mr. Prasad’s election, had contended that Mr. Prasad had submitted caste certificate claiming that he belongs to Sadara caste (BC-A) instead of Sadari Gowda, which does not belong to BC-A category. Mr. Gopala contended that Mr. Prasad actually belongs to the Sadari Gowda caste. He had also complained that Mr. Prasad was not an original resident of the State but was a migrant from Andhra Pradesh.
The court, however, kept its order in abeyance for six weeks to enable Mr. Prasad to appeal against it.
Stay order
The High Court on Friday stayed for four weeks further proceedings on the charge-sheet filed against two BBMP engineers by the Bangalore Metropolitan Task Force (BMTF).
Justice V. Jagannathan passed the order on a petition filed by Assistant Executive Engineer M.G. Nagaraj and Assistant Engineer S.R. Srinivas, both from Govindarajanagar sub-division. The charges against them are as public servants, concealing design to commit offence which is their duty to prevent, and disobeying direction of law with intent to save a person from punishment or property from forfeiture.
Interestingly, the BMTF, which had filed charge-sheet against them on July 23, has shown these engineers as absconding, and hence the Chief Metropolitan Court had issued non-bailable warrants against them. They, have, but, denied all the allegations.
