Lucknow (The Hawk): The Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly on Monday declared Vikram Saini's Khatauli constituency vacant, nearly a month after a court in Muzaffarnagar sentenced him to two years in prison in connection with the 2013 riots.
The Assembly Secretariat's statement stated that the seat would be regarded as vacant as of October 11—the day Saini was given a prison sentence.
In a letter to Speaker Satish Mahana, Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) President Jayant Chaudhary questioned why the seat of BJP MLA Vikram Saini, who was convicted in a Muzaffarnagar riots case, had not yet been declared vacant when action was swiftly taken in the case of SP MLA Azam Khan, whose seat Rampur Sadar was declared vacant.
The RLD leader argued that Saini did not suffer the same consequences as senior SP leader Azam Khan, who was sentenced to three years in prison after being found guilty in a three-year-old hate speech case and lost his Assembly membership the same day. "This makes me wonder about your motivation... If it is conceivable, the RLD leader wrote to the Speaker, the statute might be interpreted differently for MLAs from the government and opposition parties. Mahana claimed that after receiving the letter, he contacted the State Election Commission and the Muzaffarnagar District Magistrate to get more details.
"A person convicted of any offence and sentenced to imprisonment for not less than two years... shall be disqualified from the date of such conviction and shall continue to be disqualified for a further period of six years after his release," reads Section 8(3) of The Representation of the People Act, 1951.
However, BJP MLA Saini had argued that because he had already received a two-year prison sentence, his case was "not appropriate for disqualification." If I had been sentenced to three years in prison, I would have also lost my seat because "The seat is not announced empty for a jail term of two years." For more than two years, I haven't received a punishment at all, Saini had claimed.
(Inputs from Agencies)
