LUCKNOW June 16: Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav today suffered a severe setback when the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court stayed the operation of a sessions court judgment on what is termed as the infamous guest house incident of June 1, 1995.The CID had charged Samajwadi Party leaders, including Mulayam Singh Yadav, of bribing some Bahujan Samaj Party legislators to engineer defection. This, according to the CID chargesheet was a cognizable offence under Prevention of Corruption Act.Vacation Judge, Justice A N Gupta, while admitting a revision petition filed by the Uttar Pradesh government also issued notices to Yadav and eleven other persons.Sessions Judge SB Singh had in his order on May 28 held that prima facie, there was no case of corruption against Samajwadi Party leaders as was being made out by the Criminal Investigation Department, hence the case should be first tried by a judicial magistrate before being presented in the sessions court.Hearing a petition filed by the UP Government against the sessions' court verdict, the High Court observed that there was prima facie evidence showing Mulayam Singh, alongwith 11 others, as guilty. The HC also termed the lower court order as ``ridiculous''. The next date of hearing in the case has been fixed for July 22.Pleading the case on behalf of the Uttar Pradesh Government, Advocate General RN Trivedi argued that a conspiracy was hatched on June 1,1995 in which 5 BSP MLAs had been abducted. They were produced before then Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, then Assembly speaker, Dhani Ram Varma and others at official residence of Mulayam Singh only to be forced into signing a letter pledging their support to Mulayam Singh Government after BSP had opted out of the coalition.BSP had 69 MLAs and Mulayam needed the support of at least 23 BSP MLAs to save his Government without attracting provisions of the anti-defection law. The Raj Bahadur faction of BSP which had already pledged its support to Mulayam had only 15 MLAs who needed to rope in at least 4-5 more BSP MLAs to save his Government, Trivedi said.The petition further alleged that on June 2, BSP MLAs were abducted from Meerabai Marg state guest house in Lucknow, and slogans were raised against BSP supremo Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.After the abducted MLAs were forced to sign the letter of support, the Speaker immediately recognised it as separate group. The Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department which conducted investigations into the matter found that signatures of three MLAs, Jawahar Lal Diwakar and Fazlul Rehman had been forged. Five MLAs claimed that they had to sign under duress while handwriting experts could not give conclusive report about signatures of another MLA, Safdar Raza, Trivedi argued. It was also alleged that the district judge conducted the trial at the preliminary stage to which he was not entitled. Trivedi also pointed out that observation of the district judge that the evidence given by few MLAs that they were forced to sign was result of a deep rooted party rivalry or else, MLAs who were initially willing to sign resisted later in the changed power equations.
