Supreme Court Rejects Natarajan’s Plea. But Is Congress Fighting the Wrong Battle?
Image credit X.com
By KUMAR VIKRAM
The Supreme Court dismissed Meenakshi Natarajan’s Rajya Sabha nomination plea, but Congress’s fury is trained on the Election Commission’s 48-hour silence on the case.
New Delhi, June 12, 2026 — The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed Congress leader Meenakshi Natarajan’s writ petition challenging the rejection of her Rajya Sabha nomination from Madhya Pradesh. The dismissal effectively closing off her last avenue for relief before the June 18 election. But as the legal dust settles, the deeper grievance festering within the Congress party has little to do with the court — and everything to do with an Election Commission it accuses of deliberate inaction.
A bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Atul S. Chandurkar ruled that once a Returning Officer rejects a nomination paper, courts cannot intervene in an ongoing election process. Citing the constitutional bar under Article 329, the bench rejected the argument advanced by senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi that Article 32 jurisdiction could be invoked to cure “glaring and manifest” errors.
“However erroneous the decision may be, once a nomination is rejected, the remedy ordinarily lies elsewhere,” the bench observed, granting Natarajan liberty to file an election petition before the Madhya Pradesh High Court, according to a report by PTI.
The dismissal was significant on law but devastating on timing. With all three BJP candidates from Madhya Pradesh already declared elected unopposed on Thursday, a High Court petition is at best a post-mortem exercise.
The Nomination Rejection: How It Unfolded
The trigger was a complaint filed by BJP candidate Mahesh Kewat with the Returning Officer, alleging that Natarajan had failed to disclose in Form 26 a criminal case registered against her in Telangana. Returning Officer Arvind Sharma agreed, declaring the affidavit incomplete and the nomination invalid.
Congress contested the characterisation vigorously, with Singhvi arguing before the Supreme Court that the rejection under the Representation of the People Act was wrongful and technically flawed, per Law Chakra updates on X.
The Silence That Incenses Congress
The party’s anger is not primarily directed at the judiciary. Speaking to IANS after the verdict, Natarajan made the target clear: “We approached the Election Commission, but it did not take any decision — even after 48 hours, it has maintained silence.”
That studied silence, Congress argues, amounts to institutional complicity. “I have been saying from day one that the Election Commission is deeply compromised, and today this has been proven once again,” she said separately.
The allegation strikes at a structural vulnerability: when a Returning Officer makes a potentially erroneous call, the ECI is positioned as the natural first corrective body. Congress says it waited and received nothing — not even a refusal. The Supreme Court itself noted that the appropriate remedy lay with the Election Commission, making the Commission’s non-response all the more politically explosive for the opposition.
What Congress Is Really Fighting
For the Grand Old Party, this is more than one seat in the Rajya Sabha. Natarajan, a former Lok Sabha MP from Mandsaur and the AICC in-charge for Telangana, is a nationally visible figure. Her disqualification on the basis of a BJP candidate’s complaint — accepted without adjudication, the party claims — fits a narrative Congress has been building: that electoral institutions are being weaponised against the opposition.
“We will take our fight to the court of the public,” Natarajan said, suggesting that the issue will move from the courtroom to the campaign trail.
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