The Delhi High Court has asked a Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) leader to deposit cost of Rs.50,000 with the court to pursue his plea seeking its direction to quash Delhi Assembly Speaker Yoganand Shastri’s election on the ground that he adopted corrupt practices during the 2008 state assembly polls.
A bench of Justice V.K. Jain asked BJP leader Sher Singh Dagar to first deposit the cost to furnish additional evidence to the court to pursue his plea as he had failed to place additional documents to prove his allegations at the outset.
“The application is allowed, subject to the payment of Rs.50,000 as costs and the additional affidavit is taken on record,” said the order passed by the court.
Seeking that the court set aside the result of Mehrauli constituency, the BJP candidate Dagar, who had lost to Shastri from the constituency in the 2008 assembly polls, had sought to give more details on the allegations made by him against the Congress leader.
Alleging that Shastri had given false declarations at the time of filing nominations and adopted corrupt practices to win in the elections, Dagar had said that Shastri along with his agents and workers had appealed to the Muslim and Jat voters to vote for him, on grounds of race, community and religion and had distributed liquor and sarees among them.
Apart from these, Dagar had also alleged that some voters had cast their votes more than once in the same constituency (Mehrauli) and some had voted in other constituencies as well.
Dagar in his affidavit has given specific details on each of the allegations against Shastri, like the exact date and time when the alleged corrupt practices were resorted to and the names of the eye witnesses to those instances.
To substantiate his allegation of multiple votes cast by voters, he had sought to place on record the lists of voters whose names appeared at two different booths in the same constituency and voters whose names appeared in more than one constituency.
