The returning officer can accept or reject a Rajya Sabha nomination only on the basis of the documentary evidence available during the scrutiny process. For instance, during Meenakshi Natarajan's scrutiny, the BJP leaders could submit the copy of an FIR to show that she had a criminal case pending against her and she had failed to mention it in her Form-26 of nomination documents. Except that no such FIR exists in the first place, and the BJP leaders never submitted a copy of that FIR. No criminal case was ever registered against the Congress leader in Telangana, as the BJP leaders had claimed.
Just as the scrutiny window opened on June 9, the BJP operationalised its plan. The party's Madhya Pradesh leaders Mahesh Kewat and Rahul Kothari arrived at the assembly complex with a copy of a private complaint from a magistrate court in Hyderabad. The private complaint was a pre-cognisance petition—a legal draft where a judge had merely issued a notice asking why the matter should even be investigated. It carried no police FIR, no formal charges, and no judicial recognition of guilt.
Most surprisingly, it was a personal matter between a former Telugu Desam Party corporator from Hyderabad and a Congress leader from Narayanpet. She complained that they were in a relationship with Kumbham Shiva Kumar Reddy, the former District Congress Committee president of Narayanpet. However, Reddy later refused to marry her, stating that he could not marry a BC woman. The woman said in that complaint she had filed complaints in the Congress party, met Telangana PCC chief Mahesh Kumar Goud and state in-charge Meenakshi Natarajan, but they failed to punish him. The court only sent notices, and no case had yet been filed.
The only FIR available on Shiva Kumar Reddy doesn’t include Natarajan's name. However, by using this private complaint, scrutiny presiding officer A.P. Singh passed the rejection order and removed Natarajan from the contest. The strategy relied entirely on timing. Talking to THE WEEK, a seasoned bureaucrat said this document held zero weight as a "pending criminal case." Yet, for the BJP, it was the only leverage they needed.
If the RO had to pass a rejection order, he should have insisted on an FIR, and only criminal cases need to be mentioned in the Form-26, as per Section 33A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. If the charges are not framed, it doesn’t become a case to be mentioned. BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya was only referring to the “pending case,” but he never submitted the copy of an FIR.
The scrutiny presiding officer, A.P. Singh, who is also the principal secretary of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly, and the returning officer, Arvind Sharma, must have known that they could act only on the documentary evidence before them and should have insisted on seeing an FIR before rejecting the nomination of Natarajan. Otherwise, they had no business to reject the nomination.
The "Substantial Character" rule of Section 36(4) says that the RO shall not reject any nomination paper on the ground of any defect, which is not of a substantial character. If there was no criminal case pending, as per this rule, even if they had a doubt, the officials should have given the benefit of the doubt to the candidate, not the other way round.
