Cuttack, July 31: The legal battle to get chief minister Naveen Patnaik disqualified as an MLA for filing an "incorrect" affidavit before the Election Commission today boiled down to the question of maintainability of the two petitions filed in Orissa High Court.
Bhubaneswar-based human rights activist Subash Mohapatra had filed a petition for intervention against the Election Commission's alleged inaction on a complaint demanding Naveen's disqualification for certain incongruities in his poll affidavit.
Devananda Mohapatra, the BJP candidate who lost to Naveen from the Hinjili Assembly constituency in 2014, had filed a similar petition.
The dispute centred around certain discrepancies in the statement of accounts and expenses submitted by Naveen in his affidavit prior to the 2014 Assembly polls.
Both the petitions were taken up separately by the single judge bench of Justice S.K. Mishra.
Senior advocate Pitambar Acharya, appearing for the losing BJP candidate, sought the court's intervention on grounds that Naveen had automatically disqualified himself by filing the "incorrect' affidavit.
Acharya cited the provision of The Representation of People Act, 1951, under which lodging of incorrect and untrue accounts of expenditure automatically disqualifies a candidate.
He said: "Filing of accounts of expenditure is a statutory requirement of The Representation of People Act, 1951, by a candidate and his political party. Furnishing of an untrue, incorrect or a bogus account of expenditure leads to disqualification of a candidate along with a further debarment from contesting in the election for three years."
"It is necessarily not an adjudication of a dispute, but the automatic result flowing from the non-observance of statutory provision which stand incorporated in the act. It is not the Election Commission that disqualifies a person, but a person himself incurs disqualification under the statute in the event of filing of incorrect and untrue account of election expenditure," Acharya argued.
Advocate Amit Sharma, who appeared for the Election Commission, however, questioned the maintainability of the petition.
Taking note of it, Justice Mishra posted the matter to August 10 for further hearing only on the maintainability of the petition.
Sharma also raised the question about maintainability when the other petition came up. Justice Mishra posted the matter to September 5 for hearing along with the Election Commission's stand on the issue raised by the petitioner.
Justice Mishra had issued a notice to the Election Commission on July 18 after Subash Mohapatra had filed his petition seeking intervention against the Election Commission over inaction on his complaint filed in June 2016.
While issuing the notice (Naveen's Assembly constituency) and the petition was filed three years after the election.
