Anil Masih, former presiding officer of the Chandigarh mayor election tendered an unconditional apology before the Supreme Court on Friday. He came under fire for defacing ballot papers.
Appearing for Anil Masih, Senior Advocate Mukul Rohatgi, apologised to the court before a bench of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice Manoj Misra.
The Senior Advocate told the bench that they have rendered an unconditional apology. He added that he had a long chat with the former presiding officer and that this is an unconditional apology. The matter is scheduled for further hearing in the second week of July.
Earlier in February, the Supreme Court quashed the decision by Anil Masih to declare BJP candidate as winner of Chandigarh Mayor election, after a video of him defacing ballot papers went viral. The top court was hearing a petition lodged by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Councillor Kuldeep Kumar who alleged fraud in Returning Officer (RO) Masih’s decision of January 30 to declare BJP’s Manoj Sonkar as the Chandigarh Mayor.
Anil Masih had arrived at this decision after declaring eight votes for the AAP candidate to be invalid. Nonetheless, CCTV visuals had caught him defacing the eight ballot papers. While setting aside Anil Masih decision, the Supreme Court had also ruled Kuldeep Kumar to be the winner of the mayoral election instead.
The court had also rejected Masih’s explanation on why he had declared the eight votes for AAP candidate to be invalid, and strongly deprecated the conduct of the former presiding officer.
The bench stated that Masih had unlawfully altered the course of the mayoral election and that he had made a statement before the Court that was a patent falsehood. Hence, it had issued a show-cause notice to Anil Masih. The issue will now be heard in detail in July.
On January 30, BJP’s Manoj Sonkar was declared to have won the Mayor elections on the strength of 16 votes against the 12 votes received by the Congress-AAP candidate, Kuldeep Kumar.
This result was despite the fact that the AAP-Congress alliance had a majority in the house with 20 members. Nearly 36 votes were cast of which 8 votes were rejected as invalid during the counting process.
Subsequently, AAP councillor Kuldeep Kumar challenged the Mayor election results initially before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. After the High Court declined to stay the election results, he moved a plea before the Supreme Court.
While the matter was pending before the top court, the BJP candidate resigned from the post of Mayor and three AAP Councillors defected to the BJP. The Supreme Court had taken note of this development too and had said that it was distressed by such horse-trading.