ORDER

1. The appellant is the original election petitioner whose Election Petition No. 14 of 1994 came to be dismissed by A. K. Mathur, J. of the High Court of Madhya Pradesh at Jabalpur. He has, therefore, preferred this appeal against the dismissal of his election petition. The brief facts giving rise to the appeal may be stated as under :

The elections for the 10th Vidhan Sabha, State of Madhya Pradesh, came to be notified and the last date of submission of nomination forms was fixed as 30-10-1993. Appellate 1 collected the nomination form on 28-10-1993 and got it filled up on the next date. He also collected the voters list on 29-10-1993 and submitted the form on 30-10-1993 to the Returning Officer. His proposer was shown to be one Firoz Khan of the same constituency i.e. 242, Berasiya Assembly Constituency. The Returning Officer after verifying the form as required by sub-section (4) of Section 33 of the Representation of the People Act (hereinafter called the Act) accepted the same and entered the particulars thereof in the register as required by the Rules. The scrutiny of the nomination papers was fixed on 1-11-1993 and the last date for withdrawal of the forms was 3-11-1993. On the date of the scrutiny, the form of Appellant 1 came to be rejected and an order to that effect was passed as required by sub-section (6) of Section 36 of the Act. On 2-11-1993 the appellant met the Collector and protested against the illegal rejection of his nomination form. However, since there was no remedy available to him at that stage he had no alternative but no wait till the election was over. The polling took place on 24-11-1993 and the election results were declared on 30-11-1993. The respondent, L. N. Sharma was declared elected. Thereafter, the appellant along with Jodha Ram Gurjar (who had withdrawn his nomination before 3-11-1993) jointly filed an election petition on 11-1-1994 which was numbered as E.P. No. 14 of 1994. The principle question raised in the election petition was that the appellants nomination form was wrongly and illegally rejected by the Returning Officer. In this connection the contention of the appellant was that the serial number of his proposer Feroz Khan was, initially, wrongly mentioned as 136 but before the form was submitted the mistake was corrected to 138 by converting the figure 6 into 8. In support of this contention he contends that he had taken out a photocopy of the nomination form on 29-10-1993 and, therefore, on the date of scrutiny of the nomination forms and proposers number was shown as 138 and not 136 and, therefore, the Returning Officer was not justified in rejecting the same. In other words, according to the said appellant even though he had initially mentioned the figure as 136 in the nomination form he had corrected it to 138 before he submitted the nomination form to the Returning Officer and, therefore, the Returning Officer was not correct in rejecting the nomination form on the ground that the name of the proposer did not appear at Serial No. 136. To prove this contention of illegal and improper rejection of his nomination paper, Appellant 1, besides examining himself, also called the co-petitioners Jodha Ram and the proposer Feroz Khan to the witness stand. The returned candidate on the other hand contended that the nomination form as submitted by the said appellant was defective and that the correction was perhaps made after the scrutiny and rejection of the nomination paper and, therefore, the learned trial Judge was right in taking the view that the correction was subsequent to the rejection of the nomination form. He contended that the correction, therefore, appeared to be a subsequent interpolation. The learned Judge also took the view that the rejection of the nomination form was neither illegal nor improper and that the election petition was wholly misconceived and unsustainable. In that view of the matter the learned Judge dismissed the election petition and hence this appe