Hearing on Bharatpur re-polling row deferred until July 17

KATHMANDU, July 10: The hearing on Bharatpur-19  repolling row has been deferred till July 17. The hearing on a writ filed against the Election Commission’s (EC) decision to redo voting on ward 19 of Bharatpur Metropolitan was postponed as the Supreme Court (SC) once again failed to resume it.

A division bench of justice duo Om Prakash Mishra and Purushottam Bhandari was assigned to start hearing on the Bharatpur vote counting row, but they could not start it as they could not manage time, resulting postponement of hearing, said Joint-Spokesperson of the SC, Bishwo Raj Poudel.

Earlier on Friday, division bench of justices Meera Khadka and Anil Kumar Sinha had postponed the case for Monday as the SC could not conclude it.

Gunjaman Bishwokarma, a CPN-UML candidate for a ward member in Bharatpur-19 and advocate Tulasi Pandey had filed a writ petition at the SC demanding not to implement the EC’s decision to re-do voting.

The vote counting in Bharatput-19 came to halt after some cadres of CPN (Maoist Center) reportedly tore 90 ballot papers while the counting was underway in the last week of May. But the EC had decided to conduct re-voting in the ward.