PESHAWAR, Aug 2: A single bench of the Supreme Court has directed its office to fix a case pertaining to an election dispute between two political families of Peshawar before any available bench of the court.

The bench comprising Justice Mian Muhammad Ajmal was hearing an application filed by Arbab Aamir Ayub, seeking interim relief against dismissal of his writ petition by the Peshawar High Court.

The bench expressed its inability to grant interim relief to him and instead observed that his application would be heard with his main appeal by any an available bench of the apex court. The high court had dismissed his petition on June 19 and had declared his rival candidate Usman Alam Jhagra as Nazim of Union Council Meera Kachori. Arbab Aamir is brother of former MNA, Arbab Zahir, and his rival Usman Jhagra is nephew of ARD’s secretary-general, Iqbal Zafar Jhagra.

The legal battle between both parties have been in progress since the Phase 4 of local government elections were held on July 2, 2001.

Initially, Jhagra was declared winning candidate by the returning officer.

However, after a recount Aamir was declared successful as about 300 votes were excluded from the count as those ballot papers did not carry signatures of the presiding officer.

Jhagra then approached the chief election commissioner who on July 17 last year set aside the order of returning officer and declared Jhagra as Union Nazim.  Aamir had challenged the chief election commissioner’s order before the high court on the ground that the CEC had no powers to decide an election dispute, and only an election tribunal was empowered to do so. However, the petition was dismissed by the high court following which Jhagra took oath of his office.

Advocate Qazi Muhammad Anwer appeared for the petitioner before the supreme court’s bench and contended that if interim relief was not granted to the petitioner he would suffer irreparable loss.

He contended that the respondent, Jhagra should be restrained from functioning as Union Nazim until the disposal of the appeal.