Congress MLAs from Madhya Pradesh courted detention outside their party office on Akbar Road here on Friday after being prevented by police from marching towards Rashtrapati Bhavan in protest against the rejection of the nomination of Meenakshi Natarajan for election to the Rajya Sabha from the state.
Congress supporters later staged a protest outside the Election Commission headquarters.
The Congress has been up in arms against the rejection of Natarajan’s nomination, which the party’s legal experts have said was on false grounds. This has enabled the BJP to get an extra parliamentarian elected from the state.
Natarajan, the All India Congress Committee in-charge of Telangana, is a former parliamentarian from Madhya Pradesh.
At a media conference before the march to Rashtrapati Bhavan, Natarajan said: "The most important point — which sparked this entire saga — is that if there is any pending criminal case, information about it must be provided. If one has been convicted of a punishable offence, that information must also be disclosed. Naturally, I stated that these provisions did not apply to me because I am facing a legal notice. I included full legal details regarding that notice in the memorandum I submitted to the EC (on Wednesday).
"Form 26 (election nomination affidavit) does not contain a column requiring disclosure of random private complaints.... No requested information was withheld. All information sought was provided in accordance with Form 26."
The Congress contrasted the actions of the returning officer for the Rajya Sabha polls in Madhya Pradesh with those of his counterpart in Jharkhand.
The party said: "The ECI’s partisan agenda becomes clearer when its behaviour in Madhya Pradesh is contrasted with its behaviour in Jharkhand. (BJP-backed Independent) Parimal Nathwani, who has not even filed his own name accurately in his affidavit, has been given the opportunity to clarify and fix errors in his Form 26 submission. This is beyond all precedent and the Supreme Court's own direction that it is 'not the duty of the returning officer at the stage of scrutiny to draw the attention of the appellant to the aforesaid substantial defect for the purpose of getting the same cured'. But when it comes to the Prime Minister’s friends, norms and precedents are tossed aside in favour of expedience."
Assembly secretaries serve as returning officers in polls to the Rajya Sabha. They are appointed by the respective governors on the recommendation of the Speaker. The Speaker of the Jharkhand Assembly is an MLA of Congress ally Jharkhand Mukti Morcha.
Nathwani is director, corporate affairs, in Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries and has been in the Rajya Sabha since 2008 with the support of the NDA and the YSR Congress Party, which he became a member of in 2020.