The Aam Admi Party’s candidate for the South Delhi Lok Sabha seat, Raghav Chadda, on Wednesday said he would petition the High Court regarding nomination filed by BJP’s Ramesh Bidhuri after his objections raised against it were rejected by the South Delhi Returning Officer (RO).
Apart from Mr. Chadda, AAP’s East Delhi candidate Atishi also raised objections against papers filed by BJP’s East Delhi candidate Gautam Gambhir. These, however, were also rejected.
Six objections
In a letter to RO Nidhi Srivastava, Mr. Chadda had raised six objections to Mr. Bhiduri’s nomination papers. These included the omission of a pending criminal case registered against him in Bihar, alleged false declaration regarding his total income, that of his spouse and that of a dependent, the omission of an insurance policy, which was included in his 2014 affidavit and intentionally leaving blank paragraph 6A despite being required to do so.
At a hearing held by the RO, the objections were not sustained. In a written response, Mr. Bhiduri said he was unaware of the case registered against him and has undertaken to inform the public about it. He also said that his LIC policy had already matured.
Mr. Bidhuri said the allegations by AAP were proved to be “based on concocted facts” and attacked the party saying it had “gone to a very low level” because it had “already accepted their defeat” given his popularity.
In East Delhi, an alleged discrepancy in dates marked on the affidavit submitted by Mr. Gambhir, turned out to be a confusion of the serial numbers of the notary with the date of the notarial stamp, which was for April 23, according to the report of the East Delhi RO. Another objection, to do with Form 26 of the affidavit was found to be a ‘technical in nature’ and was not sustained as there was “substantial compliance” by the candidate. East Delhi RO K. Mahesh said according to the Representation of People’s Act, if there is substantive compliance then the nomination papers cannot be rejected.
Upon scrutiny of all the nominations filed on Wednesday, 60% of them were rejected. Out of 439 nominations filed by 347 candidates, only 173 nominations were accepted after scrutiny. The rest were rejected based on issues such as submitting incomplete forms, not signing each sheet and many more. The lowest number of candidates at 13 are from North West Delhi, a reserved seat, while the rest of the seats have 24 and above.
