DESPITE A Supreme Court directive for hearing the 2014 election affidavit cases against him, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is not bound to mention the two old criminal cases in his affidavit, to be submitted during filing of nomination papers for the 2019 Assembly elections, his lawyer Uday Dable said. “The defamation case of 1996 had been withdrawn by the complainant in 2015, and the other case, by the same complainant, about a land he had claimed to be his own and for which imla pavti (tax receipts) were given to slum dwellers (for the land) when Fadnavis was Nagpur mayor in 1998, was dismissed by the city chief judicial magistrate in April 2019. Hence, there is no question of mentioning the two cases in the poll affidavit this time,” Dable told The Indian Express. Fadnavis will file nomination for Nagpur South-West constituency on October 4. Satish Uke, a local lawyer, has been pursuing the two cases against Fadnavis for not mentioning them in his 2014 election affidavit. The JMFC court had, in 2015, dismissed his plea. But later, then District and Sessions Judge had set it aside, saying it wasn’t a speaking order. Fadnavis had moved the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court against this order. The HC set aside the District Judge’s order in May 2018, terming it “legally perverse”. Uke had then moved the Supreme Court, which, on Tuesday, directed the lower court to hear Uke’s complaint again.
