Nagpur Court acquits Devendra Fadnavis in case for non-disclosure of criminal cases in 2014 election affidavit

A Nagpur Court Friday acquitted Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in a case relating to non-disclosure of criminal cases filed against him in an election affidavit submitted in 2014 ..Civil judge and judicial magistrate SS Jadhav delivered the judgment after Fadnavis accepted that he had failed to disclose the criminal cases but said that it was not deliberate but an oversight on the part of his lawyer who was entrusted wih the task. The Court rejected a plea filed by a Nagpur-based lawyer Satish Uke seeking the initiation of criminal proceedings against Fadnavis for an alleged failure to disclosure information required of him under sub-section (1) of Section 33A of the Representation of People Act, 1951.Uke alleged that there were cases of cheating and forgery registered against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader in 1996 and 1998 which he did not disclose in his poll affidavit during the 2014 Assembly elections..Fadnavis was summoned to appear before the magistrate in connection with this complaint and he did so on April 15, 2023. Fadnavis refuted the charges against him. He submitted through his lawyer that there had been an inadvertent mistake while collating information about pending criminal cases.He informed the court that his lawyer had been asked to collect all details about the pending cases against him and that his lawyer failed to collate the required information.Fadnavis assured the court that there was no intention to deliberately conceal the information about the criminal cases or their non-inclusion in the poll affidavit. .The 2023 trial in this case, which was before the civil court senior division in Nagpur, was a retrial of a 2014 case..A civil judge had initially ruled against Fadnavis. However, this ruling was overturned by the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court. This case was then carried to the Supreme Court by Uke, where the Supreme Court unhesitatingly held that a case had been made to prosecute Fadnavis.The Supreme Court, therefore, set aside the judgment of the Bombay High Court and remanded the matter for trial afresh. Fadnavis also filed a review petition against this order, which the apex court dismissed in 2020.This led to the present trial in which Fadnavis was acquitted.