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Manohar Joshi to quit Maharashtra assembly

Former Maharashtra chief minister Manohar Joshi has decided to give up his membership of the state legislative assembly.

This comes in the wake of the Bombay high court's strictures against him and son-in-law Girish Vyas in the Poona land scam case.

Addressing a press conference at the Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh (Bombay Marathi Journalists' Association), Joshi said, "I have decided to resign, keeping in mind my dignity in political life, ideology in public life and conscience. I shall be giving reasons for my resignation to the speaker."

Meanwhile, a division bench consisting of Justices B N Srikrishna and S S Parkar, which continued dictating its order in the case today, held that Joshi has misused his executive power while shifting the reservation.

"There is no choice for us but to draw the inference from the fact that Mr Joshi exerted pressure on the officials into taking illegal action and this is in our view clearly a serious misuse of executive powers. Things moved at tremendous speed and several obstacles in the way of granting development rights were overcome with extreme intervention," the judges observed.

Joshi said he would approach the Supreme Court once the high court had completed delivery of its judgment.

Earlier, in 1994, Joshi had resigned as leader of the opposition when the high court had passed strictures against him for hurting the religious sentiments of people. He had then approached the Supreme Court which had absolved him of all charges, he pointed out.

UNI

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