By L S Herdenia
BHOPAL: Despite having more than the required number of votes, the Congress failed to get its candidate Meenakshi Natarajan elected to the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh. All the three vacant seats went to the BJP, though it had the numbers to win just two.
The Returning Officer rejected the nomination of Natarajan; the Election Commission of India kept mum on the Congress’s representation seeking reversal of the rejection, and the Supreme Court refused to intervene, saying that it was not competent to interfere once the election process was in motion. Now, the only remedy available to Natarajan is to file an election petition in the High Court which may drag on for years.
53-year-old Meenakshi was a surprise choice for RS candidature by the Congress. Her family hails from Tamil Nadu and her father settled in Madhya Pradesh’s Ratlam before her birth. She rose through the ranks in the Congress serving as NSUI national president and MP Youth Congress president and was picked by Rahul Gandhi for appointment as AICC secretary in 2008. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, she defeated BJP heavyweight Laxmi Narayan Pandey from Mandsaur constituency in Madhya Pradesh. Pandey had won from Mandsaur eight times and a young Natarajan defeating him created a stir in the political circles. However, she lost in the 2014 elections.
Natarajan is known for her oratorical skills and for her simple lifestyle. She spins a charkha for one hour every day and keeps Maun Vrat one day every week.
Natarajan filed her nomination paper as the Congress candidate. The BJP nominated a party leader from Punjab, Tarun Chugh, and a local leader Rajneesh Agarwal as its nominees. Given the strength of the two parties in the Vidhan Sabha, all the three would have got elected unopposed. The state BJP chief Hemant Khandelwal declared that the BJP would be contesting only two seats.
However, on the last day of the filing of nominations the BJP brought in a third candidate, Mahesh Kewat. The party’s tone changed overnight with the chief minister Mohan Yadav asserting that the party would ensure the victory of all its three candidates.
That created panic in the Congress camp as a back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that the BJP needed cross voting by just 10 Congress MLAs to ensure the victory of its third candidate. The Congress decided to shift its MLAs to Bengaluru to prevent poaching.
A 75-seater aircraft was hired by the party. It landed at Bhopal at noon on June 10 and Congress MLAs – some with their wives and children in tow – reached the airport. The airport authorities allowed the aircraft to take off after a gap of two hours. Even as the plane was moving towards the runway, news came that Natarajan’s nomination had been rejected. The plane was recalled and the MLAs went back to their homes.
The Returning Officer, the secretary of the Vidhan Sabha, rejected the nomination of Natarajan on the ground that in her nomination papers she had not disclosed a criminal case pending against her in Hyderabad. The Congress argued that the Representation of People’s Act only requires disclosure of cases in which a court has framed charges and where there is a provision for imprisonment of more than two years in case of conviction. In Natarajan’s case, a woman Congress leader (Natarajan was the AICC secretary in-charge for Telangana) had filed a private complaint against her, following which the court had issued a notice to her. The court had not taken cognizance of the case and no charges had been framed.
But neither the Returning Officer nor the ECI accepted the plea. A Congress delegation, comprising, among others, KC Venugopal and Vivek Tankha, met the ECI and demanded reversal of the ROs decision. However, the ECI neither rejected their plea nor accepted it. It simply kept mum.
The next day (June 11) after the expiry of the deadline for withdrawal of nominations a 3 pm, all the three BJP candidates were declared elected unopposed and within minutes, certificates were handed over to them. Natarajan approached the Supreme Court, which, on June 12, refused to intervene saying that the ‘remedy lies elsewhere’.
It is definitely a major setback for the Congress party. The BJP is taking the stand that internal wrangling in the Congress was responsible for Natarajan’s loss. The party says that it was tipped off about the case by Telangana Congress leaders and that the glaring omission in the nomination paper was deliberate.
A section of state Congress leaders is also blaming their own party. They argue that when it was well known to the party leadership that the entire machinery was in the control of the BJP, it could have erred on the side of caution. “What was the harm if the case had been mentioned even if it was not required to?” a young Congress MLA wanted to know. It is also being pointed out that the Congress did not field a dummy candidate, who could have replaced Natarajan. (IPA Service)
