New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday (October 9) stayed a Kerala high court order which had refused to suspend the conviction of Mohammed Faizal, the disqualified Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Lakshadweep MP, in an attempt to murder case.With this decision, the bench of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and Sanjay Karol effectively restored Faizal’s Lok Sabha membership. The court also sought responses from the Lakshadweep administration and the complainants in the case, Bar and Bench reported.Faizal had October 4 been disqualified as the Lok Sabha member from Lakshadweep following the Kerala high court’s refusal the day before to suspend his conviction.In January this year, Faizal and three others were convicted for attempting to murder a Congress leader’s son-in-law during the 2009 general elections. The court sentenced him to 10 years in jail, which led to his automatic disqualification from the Lok Sabha. A couple of weeks later, another single-judge bench of the Kerala high court suspended his conviction. The thrust of the court’s order was on the expenditure to the exchequer that the by-election would cause. He was eventually reinstated as a member of the Lok Sabha.In August, the Supreme Court set aside that order, asking the high court to consider the matter afresh. It said that if the high court’s reasoning was allowed to stand, the conviction and sentence of every elected politician would have to be suspended to avoid the financial burden of bye-elections.On October 3, the high court once again refused to suspend his conviction but suspended the sentence.Faizal’s lawyer Kapil Sibal has argued that the incident was a fight between Congress and NCP workers, and that the witnesses were all Congress workers and there are no independent witnesses.
