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A Division Bench of the High Court of Karnataka has permitted those candidates who were elected to the governing body of the Karnataka Medical Council (KMC) in 2021 to take charge and complete the term from the date they assume the office.
The Bench, comprising Justice R. Devdas and Justice C.M. Joshi, passed the order recently, while setting aside a judgment of a single judge who, on June 7, 2021, quashed the results of the elections by declaring that “the elections were vitiated owing to a fraud by the Returning Officer (RO),” a Joint Registrar of Department of Cooperative Societies.
However, the Bench said that “having regard to the settled position of law, only an election tribunal is permitted to declare the election or results of the election as void or illegal” and hence “the single-judge Bench could not have quashed the final voters’ list published in January 2020 by the Returning Officer or declared the results of the election.”
Meanwhile, the Bench said that grievances regarding validity of the voters’ list and other issues can be agitated in an election petition while allowing reopening of an earlier election petition, which was closed following the judgment of the single-judge Bench.
The Division Bench passed the order on appeals by Madhusudhan Kariganoor and other medical practitioners challenging the single judge’s verdict.
The single judge had set aside elections on a petition filed by one Gachinamani Naganatha, a medical practitioner from Kalaburagi.
The Bench declined to stay operation of its order to enable the petitioner to approach the Supreme Court by accepting the contention of the appellants that setting aside of the election had indirectly enabled the previous governing body to continue in the office.
