NEW DELHI: After the Supreme Court dismissed Congress leader Meenakshi Natarajan’s plea challenging the rejection of her nomination papers for the Rajya Sabha polls, the Congress is preparing to take its protest from the courtroom to the streets. Details of the campaign will be announced next week, sources said.
The top court on Friday dismissed the Congress leader’s plea while granting her liberty to raise the challenge in an election petition. A bench comprising Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Atul S Chandurkar rejected the argument by Natarajan’s counsel senior advocate Abhishek Singhvi, that Article 32 can be invoked to cure “glaring and manifest” errors in rejection of her nomination.
Party sources said discussions on the next legal step are ongoing. Alongside its nationwide campaign on unemployment and examination paper leaks announced on Thursday, the Congress is also expected to focus on what it calls “electoral manipulation”.
Natarajan told the media that she had duly filled Form 26 and that there was no column to disclose private complaints. “If there was a column for it, I would have given the details,” she said at a press meet.
“Since the matter is sub-judice and is being heard in the Supreme Court today, I will not discuss all the points as it would not be appropriate. But I will talk about one thing that is already in the public domain and is also present on the Election Commission’s website: The root of this entire matter is Form 26, in which it was claimed that I failed to record certain information and concealed facts,” she said.
The most important requirement, Natarajan said, is disclosure of any pending criminal case or conviction for a punishable offence.
“Naturally, I wrote ‘Not Applicable’ for all these things because there is only a legal notice against me, and I included the full legal details of that notice in the memorandum I submitted to the EC.
There is only that single legal notice which the court has not even taken cognisance of yet. Therefore, there should be clarity on where the column to record such information actually was,” she said.
Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Jitu Patwari said this was the first instance in Indian politics in which nomination of a Rajya Sabha candidate had been rejected, and that it had become a topic of national discussion.
In a statement, the Congress described the June 2026 Rajya Sabha election as a story of two candidates—one “a billionaire friend of PM Modi” representing corporate interests and another from an ordinary family representing constitutional values.
