The Congress has demanded from the Election Commission of India (ECI) that the parliamentary membership of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Betul Jyoti Dhurve should be scrapped and she should be booked under criminal laws after her caste certificate was found to be forged.
Chief spokesman of Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) KK Mishra in a statement here on Wednesday said, “Dhurve has been under scanner for her caste certificate since 2009 and now the State’s high level scrutiny committee has found that she forged and abrogated it. In the light of this finding and action the Congress party demands from ECI to not only immediately scrap the membership of Dhurve from lok Sabha but should also book her under the criminal laws for forgery.”
Mishra further said that not only Dhurve’s parliamentarian membership should be scrapped but she should be booked for grabbing the Betul lok Sabha seat meant for Schedule Tribe through forged certificate and committing forgery with the ECI, exhibiting forge certificate as real under criminal sections of the IPC besides the salary, wages and other facilities and expenses incurred on her as an parliamentarian should be recovered from her.
Mishra also criticized the Tribal Development department for pulling up the case for nine years under political pressure and said that the officials of the department concerned with the case should also be prosecuted for indulging in this conspiracy.
Because it was with the support of the Tribal Development department that Dhurve succeeded in depriving the eligible Tribal candidates’ from their rights and that comes under serious crime. Else the department should come clean that why and under whose pressure it took so long in enquiry of such a small case, he added.
Notably, the findings of the high level scrutiny committee have came just after ten days of Dhurve’s purported comments that Prime Minister Narendra Modi got “married but didn’t set up his household” has gone viral over social media on April 23, 2017.