Kerala High Court To Consider BJP Candidates' Challenge Against Rejection Of Election Nominations Tomorrow

In a special sitting held on Sunday afternoon, the Kerala High Court sought the response of the Election Commission of India to the petitions filed by two BJP candidates challenging the rejection of their election nominations in Thalassery and Guruvayoor constituencies for the upcoming assembly elections.

A single bench of Justice N Nagersh has asked the ECI to file its counter-affidavit by tomorrow in the writ petitions filed by N Haridas and Nivedida Subramaniam, who had submitted nominations to contest from Thalassery and Guravayoor constituencies respectively. The cases will be considered tomorrow at 12 noon.

The Returning Officers of the said constituencies had rejected their nominations on Saturday after scrutiny citing the reason that the signature of the President/Secretary of BJP was absent in the 'Form A' submitted by both the candidates.

Senior Advocates S Sreekumar and K Ramkumar, appearing for Haridas and Nivedida respectively, argued that the Returning Officers acted illegally by rejecting the nominations on the basis of technical defects, which were curable. It was argued that the Returning Officers acted with undue haste to reject the nominations, without affording an opportunity to the candidates to cure the defects. Contending that the absence of signature was not fatal, the candidates sought a direction to the Returning Officers to accept their nominations.

According to them, the Returning Officer has discretionary powers to allow the rectification of such defects. In this regard, they argued that in constituencies like Piravom and Kondotty, the Returning Officers had given time to candidates to cure similar defect in election forms.

During the hearing which lasted for nearly two hours, the bench examined the copies of Form A and Form B produced by the petitioners. Form A is the intimation given by the President or the Secretary of the Political Party to the Returning Officer regarding the person authorized by the Party to nominate the names of the candidates sponsored by the Party. Form B is the intimation given by the authorized person of the party regarding the candidate sponsored by the Party.

In these cases, the Returning Officer rejected the nominations citing the reason that Form A did not have the signature of the Party President/Secretary.

The Election Commission of India told the Court that judicial interference in poll matters is barred after the notification of elections, as per Article 329B of the Constitution.

The UDF candidate of Thalassery has filed a petition to implead in Haridas's plea. The bench said that it will consider the imlpeading petition at a later stage.

Kerala is going to polls on April 6.