HC to hear plea of 11 aspirants from Kejriwal’s constituency
New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Monday agreed to hear pleas by eleven aspirants, who were not allowed to file nomination papers from the New Delhi Assembly seat, from where Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is contesting.
The court will hear the matter on Tuesday.
The matter was mentioned before a division bench of the High Court presided by Chief Justice D.N. Patel and Justice C. Harishankar.
The plea filed through Advocate Viplav Sharma sought direction to concerned officials to make appropriate guidelines and to facilitate the smooth filing of the nomination papers by all candidates from all walks of the Indian society.
“..to make provisions/guidelines for requiring the candidates to submit identical copy of their nomination papers to be submitted to Returning Officer/Election Officer, the whole copy whereof be thereafter returned to the candidates after scrutiny with the order of finding the such nomination to be found valid or rejected,” the plea said.
The petitioner said that their nomination papers were wrongly, illegally, arbitrarily and unconstitutionally rejected and thereby, they have been illegally and unconstitutionally deprived of their constitutional rights.
“When the said petitioner raised objections, the Election Officer not completely disregarded the same but also was intimated by the police force deployed thereat.
“It is a case of the petitioners that the token system which was adopted by the Election Officer on 20.1.2020 was cancelled by him for favouring Shri Kejriwal in as much as had he continued with same, he would have been required to continue accepting the nomination papers of the leftover candidates of the previous day (i.e 20.1.2020 which included Petitioner No. 8 and other 20 plus candidates) and thereafter, he was to issue token to the large number of candidates who had reached the election office on 21.1.2020 before or at 11:00 a.m. till about 12:30 p.m. when Shri Kejriwal reached the Election office which would have seen his getting token no. 115 or so and thereby, would have enabled 115 plus candidates file their nomination papers to run for election against Shri Kejriwal,” the plea said.
