Know your limits: HC warns JD(S) leader Prajwal Revanna during hearing in court
Bengaluru (PTI): The Karnataka High Court on Wednesday warned JD(S) leader Prajwal Revanna to behave properly in the court during a hearing in a case related to his campaign for the Hassan Lok Sabha seat in 2019.
Revanna, who is the lone Lok Sabha member from Karnataka representing his party, is facing challenge to his election as Hassan MP in two election petitions the court is hearing.
On Wednesday, Revanna was in the witness box answering questions posed by the advocate for the petitioner, Keshava Reddy. His extended answers and his attempt to casually chat with the advocate after the questioning did not go down well with the court.
The single judge bench of Justice K Natarajan, who is hearing the case, had to warn him.
"Know your limits. You are in a court. Do not speak like you do outside," the court cautioned him. The MP was, then, allowed to sit on a chair inside the witness box.
The petition has been filed by A Manju, the defeated candidate in the Hassan parliamentary constituency in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls which Prajwal Revanna won. The petition alleged that Revanna has not declared all the expenses made by him in the polls before the Election Commission.
One of the questions posed to him on Wednesday was about the participation of former prime minister H D Deve Gowda in his campaign and his arrival in a helicopter for the same.
Revanna replied that since Deve Gowda was a star campaigner of the party, the election expense incurred by him is not added to the candidate's expenditure.
Meanwhile, Revanna has filed an affidavit in court seeking permission to travel abroad for treating his back injury sustained in an accident last year. He has stated that he would be treated in London between October 23 and 26 and would return on November 1.
The hearing of the petition has been adjourned to November 4 for cross examination.
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NDA sweeps bypolls to four assembly segments in Bihar
Patna (PTI): The ruling NDA in Bihar on Saturday swept the bypolls to four assembly segments, retaining Imamganj and wresting from the INDIA bloc Tarari, Ramgarh and Belaganj, receiving a boost ahead of the assembly elections due next year.
Candidates of the Jan Suraaj, floated recently by former political strategist Prashant Kishor with much fanfare, lost deposits in all but one seat, in a clear indication that the fledgling party, despite claims of taking the political landscape in the state by storm, needs to cover much ground.
The biggest setback for the INDIA bloc, helmed by the RJD, came in Belaganj, a seat the party had been winning since its inception in the 1990s, but this time lost to the JD(U) headed by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the arch-rival of its founding president Lalu Prasad.
The JD(U) candidate Manorama Devi, a former MLC, defeated by a margin of more than 21,000 votes RJD’s Vishwanath Kumar Singh who made his debut from a seat that fell vacant upon election to Lok Sabha of his father Surendra Prasad Yadav, a multiple term MLA.
The margin of victory was greater than the 17,285 votes polled by Mohd Amjad of Jan Suraaj, whom the RJD may have liked to blame for its defeat by causing a split in Muslim votes.
JD(U) national spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad said, "The people of Bihar deserve kudos for rejecting the negativity of the opposition and reposing their trust in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Under his leadership, the NDA will win more than 200 seats of the 243-strong assembly in 2025."
The RJD also suffered an embarrassing defeat in Ramgarh, where Prashant Kishor’s prediction of the party “finishing third or fourth” came true. The forecast had caused Sudhakar Singh, son of state RJD president Jagadanand Singh, the MP from Buxar who had won the assembly seat in 2020, to threaten that Jan Suraaj cadres in the constituency will be “beaten up with sticks”.
Singh’s younger brother Ajit finished a distant third after BJP winner Ashok Kumar Singh, a former MLA, and Satish Kumar Singh Yadav who fought on a ticket of the BSP, which has little foothold in Bihar.
Jan Suraaj, though, was hardly a factor in Ramgarh, where its candidate Sushil Kumar Singh polled less than four per cent votes.
The BJP also pulled off a stunning victory in Tarari, which falls under the Arrah Lok Sabha seat, currently represented by CPI(ML)’s Sudama Prasad, who had won the assembly segment for two consecutive terms.
CPI(ML) candidate Raju Yadav lost, by a margin of a little over 10,000 votes, to BJP debutant Vishal Prashant, better known as the son of local strongman Sunil Pandey, who was formerly with the JD(U) and had joined the saffron party a few months ago.
Jan Suraaj had initially announced that it was fielding a former Vice Chief of the Army in Tarari but later disclosed that he could not contest because of technical reasons. Its candidate Kiran Singh got less than four per cent votes.
The most respectable performance from Jan Suraaj came in the reserved Imamganj seat where its candidate Jitendra Paswan stood third, polling well over 20 per cent votes.
The seat, however, went to Deepa Kumari, daughter-in-law of Union minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, who defeated RJD’s Raushan Kumar by a slender margin of less than 6,000 votes.
Manjhi, who heads the Hindustani Awam Morcha, vacated Imamganj earlier this year upon getting elected to Lok Sabha from Gaya.
With the exception of Ashok Singh in Ramgarh, the winners in all the seats shall be making their debut in the state assembly.
