Sacked BSF jawan Tej Bahadur Yadav on monday moved the Supreme Court challenging the Election Commission’s decision to cancel his candidature from the Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is contesting. In his plea, Yadav termed the decision of the poll panel discriminatory and unreasonable and said it should be set aside.
Yadav was fielded by the Samajwadi Party as its candidate from the Varanasi seat. The SP had initially fielded Shalini Yadav as its candidate to contest against Modi and later nominated the sacked BSF jawan. However, the returning officer rejected Yadav’s nomination papers citing his failure to submit a certificate that he was not sacked for either corruption or disloyalty.
Blaming the BJP for the rejection, SP leader and MP Dharmendra Yadav said that the “fake chowkidar” was scared of a real one.
“Rejection of nomination papers of Tej Bahadur from Varanasi seat was a BJP conspiracy. The naqli chowkidar got scared of the asli chowkidar… this is the reason why the entire BJP was sitting in the Election Commission and BJP president Amit Shah and UP CM Yogi Adityanath were camping in Varanasi that day,” Yadav had said.
Tej Bahadur Yadav, the Border Security Force (BSF) Constable was dismissed from service after he had released a video in 2017 on quality of food served to soldiers. He had posted four videos on the social media in January, 2017, that showed him complaining about the unpalatable food at his camp along the Indo-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir.
The videos triggered outrage across the nation, but the BSF dismissed his allegations. The Centre had justified his sacking from the BSF, saying that the video posted by Yadav might have “led to mutiny among the armed forces”.