The Election Commission on Tuesday turned down a petition from 20 Aam Aadmi Party MLAs seeking to cross-examine petitioner Prashant Patel, who had demanded their disqualification for holding offices of profit, PTI reported. The legislators said they wanted to disprove the allegations against them.
The poll panel, however, said there was no “occasion and need” for the cross-examination. “He is not a witness in the present proceedings and the respondents have failed to make out a case for calling any witness as pleaded in their applications,” the panel said in a 70-page order.
The legislators were disqualified on January 19 after the Election Commission concluded that they held offices of profit as parliamentary secretaries to ministers in the Delhi government, posts they had been appointed to in March 2015.
On March 23, the Delhi High Court set aside the poll panel’s recommendation and asked the commission to consider each case on merit afresh.
The poll panel had first issued notices about their appointment in March 2016. After that the AAP government amended the Delhi Members of Legislative Assembly (Removal of Disqualification) Act, 1997, to exempt the post from the definition of “office of profit”. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal claimed at the time that the parliamentary secretaries were “working for free”, but Pranab Mukherjee, then India’s president, rejected the bill in June 2016. In September 2016, the Delhi High Court scrapped the appointments.
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