The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Tuesday slammed BJP after President Droupadi Murmu took cognisance of the memorandum submitted by the saffron party and forwarded it to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), seeking action on BJP’s demands to dismiss Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal-led government in Delhi.

A delegation of BJP MLAs met President Murmu on August 30 and submitted a memorandum, urging her urgent intervention in the Constitutional crisis plaguing Delhi due to Kejriwal’s imprisonment.

Retorting sharply at BJP, Delhi Minister Atishi accused the saffron party of conspiring to topple the Kejriwal government through the back door by imposition of the President’s rule in Delhi.

The accusation comes a day after the Opposition BJP stated in the memorandum that Delhi was facing a constitutional crisis and demanded proper attention on the matter from the MHA.

AAP’s Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh also lashed out at the BJP, declaring that his party is prepared for the elections.

“If BJP feels that it wants to lose quickly, then it should announce the date of Delhi Assembly elections tomorrow itself. We are ready for the elections,” Singh said.

Talking to PTI, Atishi said that if the Kejriwal government is toppled, the Delhiites will give a befitting reply by giving zero seats to the BJP in the upcoming Assembly elections and the AAP will win all the 70 seats.

Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta on Monday alleged that paralysis of governance in Delhi was caused by Chief Minister Kejriwal being in jail for more than four months on serious corruption charges in the excise policy case.

Atishi said the BJP’s only job is to topple the elected governments in the country through its “Operation Lotus” as happened in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Manipur.

“They also tried Operation Lotus in Delhi to topple the government by poaching the AAP MLAs, but they failed. Now, they are conspiring to impose the President’s Rule through the back door to topple the popular government of Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi,” she alleged.

The elections to the 70 seats of the Delhi Assembly are due early next year.

The Delhi Patiala House Court on Tuesday granted interim bail to Jammu and Kashmir’s Baramulla MP Sheikh Rashid alias Engineer Rashid till October 2 in a terror funding case, ahead of Assembly elections.

The Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) leader Rashid was arrested by National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the stringent UAPA {Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act} in 2017.

Rashid, who has been in Delhi’s Tihar Jail since 2019, was arrested by the probe agency after his name cropped up during the investigation of Kashmiri businessman Zahoor Watali.

To campaign in the upcoming Assembly polls in the Union Territory, the AIP leader Rashid had moved the court seeking interim bail for exercising his rights.

According to the national probe agency, he was allegedly funding terror groups and separatists in Kashmir.  

Kashmiri separatist leader Yasin Malik, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed and Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin were among the names in the chargesheet filed by the NIA in the case.

In 2022, Kashmiri separatist leader Malik was sentenced to life imprisonment by a trial court after he pleaded guilty to the charges.

In the recent Lok Sabha elections, Engineer Rashid, contesting as an independent candidate, defeated former Chief Minister and National Conference (NC) Vice President Omar Abdullah from the Baramulla seat.

As the Union Territory is set to vote in the Assembly elections next week, Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party has recently released a list of candidates for nine seats in the upcoming Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections. 

The list includes Abdul Qayoom Mir from Pampore; Harbaksh Singh from Tral; Sofi Iqbal from Pulwama; Molvi Fayaz Wagay from Zainapora in Shopian; Mohammad Arif Dar from DH Pora in Kulgam; Suhail Bhat from Devsar in Kulgam; Hilal Ahmad Malik from Dooru in Anantnag; Aqib Mushtaq from Anantnag West and Tawseef Nisar from Anantnag.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday stayed the defamation proceedings before a trial court against Congress MP Shashi Tharoor over his “scorpion on Shivling” remarks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A bench of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and R Mahadevan issued notice to the Delhi government and the complainant BJP leader Rajiv Babbar in the case. The notice is returnable in four weeks.

Tharoor has moved the Apex Court against Delhi High Court order which refused to quash defamation proceedings against him on August 29.

The High Court in its order had noted that the comment made by Tharoor exemplifies that PM Modi is unacceptable with many in the RSS establishment and compares the expression of their frustration, as dealing with a leader with the characteristics of a scorpion possessing a venomous instinct.

The Court had further noted that Tharoor’s comments apparently not only defamed PM Modi, but the party represented by him, including RSS and the members of the party for having accepted the leadership.

The Congress leader had sought to set aside the trial court’s April 27, 2019 order summoning him as an accused in the criminal defamation complaint filed by BJP leader Babbar as also the November 2, 2018 complaint.

During the brief hearing, advocate Muhammad Ali Khan, representing Tharoor, argued that Babbar, or any other party member, could not be brought within the ambit of an aggrieved person under the defamation law when the person against whom the statement was issued has not taken any action.

Khan added that Tharoor’s statement was protected under the immunity clause of the defamation law, which laid down that any comment made in good faith was not criminal. According to the lawyer, Tharoor’s statement was borrowed from an article published on Modi in 2012 when the latter was the chief minister of Gujarat.

The criminal complaint was filed against Tharoor in the trial court by Babbar, who claimed that his religious sentiments were hurt by the Congress leader’s statement.

In October 2018, Tharoor had claimed that an unnamed RSS leader had compared Modi to “a scorpion sitting on a Shivling”. The Congress leader had said it was an “extraordinarily striking metaphor”.