BJP MP Jyoti Dhurve, 52, elected from Betul Lok Sabha seat in Madhya Pradesh, faces the danger of losing her membership of Parliament after the Madhya Pradesh High Court ordered on Monday the state government’s Tribal Welfare Department to determine her tribal status within 15 days. Dhurve is accused of falsifying her scheduled tribe certificate.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court also imposed fines on two IAS officers for being lax in the case.
Dhurve is a two-time MP from Betul, a seat reserved for tribals. She has represented the seat since 2009. The scheduled tribe certificate she produced to contest elections was challenged in the Madhya Pradesh High Court in 2010. The decision on her tribal status had been pending for the last eight years as a high-level committee to determine her status had been sitting on it. However, instructions from High Court last year forced the committee to decide the case in a fixed-time period.
Justice Sujoy Paul of the principal bench of Madhya Pradesh High Court, Jabalpur, hearing a contempt of court petition filed by Shankar Peddam, expressed unhappiness over the casual approach of senior IAS officers in the Dhurve case, which he termed “a serious matter”. Justice Paul imposed a personal fine of Rs 1,000 on Principal Secretary Ashok Shah and Commissioner Deepali Rastogi. Both officers are posted in the Tribal Welfare department of the Madhya Pradesh government.
Earlier, in May 2017, the committee empowered to scrutinise Dhurve's scheduled tribe certificate had declared she was not a tribal. However, later, the high-level committee of the Tribal Welfare department, owing to political pressure, kept the matter pending. Unhappy over the delay, Peddam approached the Madhya Pradesh High Court, which ordered a fast disposal of the case following laid-down rules and regulations.
However, since the issue had serious political ramifications, the officials did not take any action. Unhappy over this, the complainant again went to the Madhya Pradesh High Court recently.
In 2016, the High Court on a petition from Peddam, had issued a notice to the state government to decide the tribal status of Dhurve. Dhurve had been evading the notices sent by the high-level committee for several years. Finally, when she appeared before the committee, she could not submit enough evidence to prove her claim of belonging to a tribal community.
Peddam said Dhurve originally belonged to the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category before getting married to Prem Singh Dhurve. Her actual name before marriage was Jyotikiran Thakur. She graduated from Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur, and got a scheduled tribe certificate from Raipur in 1984.
Peddam, who had contested against Dhurve as an independent candidate, said that official documents of her father and uncle clearly mentioned that they belonged to OBC category, while she claimed to be a tribal just because she married a person from the tribal community.
With the High Court asking the state government to decide her scheduled tribe certificate case, Dhurve, who had been chairman of the state Scheduled Tribe Commission, now faces the danger of being disqualified from the Lok Sabha. Dhurve was also made national general secretary of BJP by Amit Shah three years ago.