Court order on summoning Smriti Irani on Oct 18

A court here on Saturday fixed October 18 to pass an order on whether to issue summons to Union Minister Smriti Irani, accused of giving false information about her educational qualifications in three affidavits.

The order was reserved by Metropolitan Magistrate Harvinder Singh after an Election Commission of India (ECI) official submitted a certificate regarding authentication of the election affidavits filed by Irani in 2004 election.

In the last hearing, the court had asked the ECI to file a certificate to authenticate the election affidavits, observing that the affidavits exhibited in the court were a copy of the electronic record available on the Commission's website.

At that time, the Commission had told the court that Irani's original 2004 election affidavit had got misplaced, the complainant's counsel told the media waiting outside the court.

The court was hearing a private complaint by Ahmer Khan, who accused Irani of submitting varying details about her educational qualifications in her three affidavits filed before the ECI for the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha polls held in 2004, 2011 and 2014.

Khan, who filed the complaint in April last year, sought action against Irani on charge of lying under oath about her educational qualification.

His counsels K.K. Manan and Anjali Rajput alleged that the BJP leader declared herself to be a 1996-batch graduate from the Delhi University's School of Correspondence in her affidavit filed for the 2004 Lok Sabha election from Delhi's Chandni Chowk constituency.

But, in her affidavit for the 2014 Lok Sabha election, when she contested from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, she allegedly said she did her B.Com (Part I) in 1994 from the Delhi University's School of Open Learning.

Khan said that in yet another affidavit filed on July 11, 2011, for the Rajya Sabha election from Gujarat, she said her highest educational qualification was B.Com (Part I) from the Delhi University's School of Correspondence.

--IANS

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