Shah to contest RS poll from Gujarat, Smriti gets ticket too
NEWDELHI:The BJP on Wednesday fielded its president Amit Shah for the August 8 Rajya Sabha election in Gujarat.
Shah is currently a member of the Gujarat legislative assembly and this is for the first time that he will become a member of Parliament. Union minister Smriti Irani, too, has got a BJP ticket to contest the poll for membership of the upper house.
The BJP’s election committee cleared these names at a meeting, also attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at the party headquarters on Wednesday.
Three Rajya Sabha members from the western state – Irani, Dilipbhai Pandya and Congress’ Ahmed Patel – are retiring next month. Patel filed his nomination papers on Wednesday. Given its current strength in the legislative assembly, whose member vote in the Rajya Sabha election, both Shah and Irani will get elected to the upper house of parliament.
Congress, too, has sufficient members to get Patel elected, but cross voting by 11 Congress MLAs during the July 17 Presidential election and the rebellion by outgoing leader of opposition Shankersinh Vaghela has the Congress worried.
The BJP will be left with 27 extra votes after getting its two candidates elected, and the party is keeping the option open to support any independent candidate, if there is one. Speculation is rife that a close relative of Vaghela may join the poll fray as an independent candidate in Gujarat.
The BJP has also fielded tribal leader Sampatia Uike for the lone Rajya Sabha seat falling vacant following the death of then environment minister Anil Madhav Dave.
Vaghela on Wednesday made it clear that he has no intention of contesting August 8 Rajya Sabha elections. He said his vote as MLA is reserved for Congress candidate Ahmed Patel.
“I have assured Patel that my vote is for you. But only if Gujarat in-charge Ashok Ghelot will take back his statements that CBI and ED cases were the reasons that I have left the Congress. Or I will resign as MLA before RS polls’’, said Vaghela.
high court, in a recent order, held that a “working woman,” who is “capable of maintaining and sustaining herself,” should not be entitled to receiving maintenance from her estranged spouse.
A bench of Justices RM Savant and Sadhana Jadhav were hearing a plea filed by a television actress, who had challenged a family court order denying her any interim maintenance.
The petitioner separated from her husband, who is also a TV actor, in 2010. While their divorce proceedings are currently pending in the family court, she had sought that considering that her husband had not paid her any maintenance amount in the years since their separation, the family court award her an interim maintenance amount of ₹50,000 each month till the divorce decree is granted.
Her husband, meanwhile, had opposed her demand for interim maintenance saying that while he had worked in TV shows produced by Balaji telefilms between 2005 and 2010, since then, he hadn’t had a stable source of income. He had claimed that he now works “as and when he gets an assignment.”
The family court had accordingly held that since both the parties had failed to produce any documentary evidence of the money that they were making annually, the issue of maintenance would have to be decided upon at a later stage, after examination and cross-examination.
In the high court, however, the woman claimed that she wasn’t part of any TV shows or films currently and thus, had no money of her own. She claimed that for her survival, she was “totally dependent upon her aging parents.” Taking note of these submissions, the high court held that the mere fact that the petitioner was not part of any TV shows or films currently, did not entitle her to interim maintenance. It held that considering that she was an actor who had been working for the past several years, and that she was “capable of finding work in the future, and thus, sustaining herself,” it did not deem it fit to interfere with the family court’s order.