Raj Babbar gets two-year jail for assaulting polling officer in 1996

The court has also imposed a fine of Rs 8,500 on the actor turned politician

Congress leader Raj Babbar was on Thursday sentenced to two-year imprisonment by an MP-MLA court in a 26 year old case pertaining to assaulting a polling agent and disrupting the polling process.

Special additional chief judicial magistrate Ambarish Kumar Srivastava also imposed a fine of Rs 8,500 on Babbar, who was present in the court when the verdict was pronounced.

Babbar, a former UP Congress president, was, however, enlarged on bail after the verdict. Congress said that it would file an appeal against the judgement.

According to the prosecution an FIR had been registered against Babbar in the Wazirganj police station in the state capital charging him with assaulting Shrikrishna Singh, a polling officer and disrupting the polling process on May 2, 1996.

It was alleged that Babbar, then a Samajwadi Party (SP) candidate, had barged into the polling centre with his supporters and had assaulted the polling officer. An SP leader, Arvind Yadav was also charged along with Babbar.

Babbar's lawyers said that he had one month to file an appeal against the judgement. "We are going to move the higher court to challenge the verdict," an aide of Babbar said here.

Babbar, who had later joined the Congress, had defeated SP president Akhilesh Yadav's wife Dimple Yadav from Firozabad in the Lok Sabha by-poll from there in 2009. He was made UP Congress chief later but resigned after the grand old party's drubbing in 2019 Lok Sabha polls.