This story is from November 8, 2022

SC upholds disqualification of Azam Khan’s son as MLA

SC upholds disqualification of Azam Khan’s son as MLA
Mohd Abdullah Azam Khan, son of powerful SP leader Azam Khan
NEW DELHI: Mohd Abdullah Azam Khan, son of powerful SP leader Azam Khan, would go down in the history as the only underage politician whose victory in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election was rescinded as he was only 24-year-old against the statutory eligibility requirement of 25 years.
The Supreme Court bench of Justices Ajay Rastogi and BV Nagarathna caught junior Khan lying about his age and ruled through separate but concurrent judgments that the Allahabad HC had rightly quashed his election from Suar constituency in Rampur district finding that he had not reached the age of 25 years to contest the elections in 2017 being born on January 1, 1993.
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The bench noticed that Abdullah Azam Khan had consistently maintained in the records of his school, college and passport that his date of birth was January 1, 1993. Suddenly in 2015, when his family decided that he should join politics and when his father was a powerful minister in the UP government, a Lucknow hospital was asked to provide a birth certificate showing the date to be September 30, 1990.
The bench caught the lie and said, “The records maintained by Queen Mary’s Hospital, Lucknow, which indicates that the appellant was born on September 30, 1990, is a later development and were created in the year 2015 to support that the appellant was qualified to contest election in the year 2017 in terms of the requirement of Article 173(b) of the Constitution.”
Abdullah Azam Khan had filled his nomination papers on January 24, 2017 and was declared elected in March 2017 as he had secured the highest number of votes. The bench said, “It is curious to note that the request made by the appellant’s mother was addressed to the chief health officer, Nagar Nigam, Lucknow with a statement that her son was born on September 30, 1990 in Queen Mary’s Hospital.”
The bench said she also had pleaded that her son’s birth certificate was urgently needed for “very important and unavoidable reasons” while enclosing her own affidavit. On such an application being furnished, within three days, the birth certificate was issued by Nagar Nigam, Lucknow on January 21, 2015, indicating his date of birth as September 30, 1990, which could not have been ordinarily possible to obtain by the common man.”
“A duplicate birth certificate was obtained from Queen Mary’s Hospital, Lucknow on April 21, 2015, but what happened to the original, if any, has never been placed by the appellant on record. Just to make a clarification that even in the application of January 17, 2015, submitted by (appellant’s mother) there was no mention of a certificate earlier issued and the demand is to issue a duplicate certificate of the date of birth of the appellant who is born, as alleged, in the Queen Mary’s Hospital, Lucknow on September 30, 1990. The very foundation on which the appellant has proceeded to establish that his date of birth is September 30, 1990 falls on the ground,” the bench said.
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