MUMBAI, Jan. 8 -- Even as the Bombay High Court hears a spate of petitions challenging various aspects of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections, from rejection of nomination papers to candidate eligibility, a fresh plea has been filed alleging the "mass rejection" of nomination forms across Mumbai's wards on "hyper-technical" and non-statutory grounds to "favour the ruling party". The petition, filed by Mumbai-based businessman Mozam Ali Mir, claimed that the returning officers of all 227 electoral wards in the city have rejected several nominations on frivolous grounds, such as the affidavits not being in the prescribed format, defective question-answer sheets, and non-submission of no-objection certificates (NOCs) from the water, tax and police departments. The petition also blamed the district election officer and the municipal commissioner for these "high-handed, arbitrary, and unconstitutional actions". Mir alleged that the returning officers had acted "ultra vires" (beyond their powers) by issuing a so-called Requisition List, demanding documents not prescribed in the notification issued by the State Election Commission (SEC) last month. "It is a settled principle of law that executive instructions or local circulars cannot override or supplement statutory orders of the election commission", said the petition, filed on January 5. To underline the scale of rejection, Mir cited ward-wise data. He claimed that only 150 of the 739 nomination forms distributed in ward No. 23 were accepted, due to "the illegal insistence on non-statutory NOCs and hyper-technical rejections". Similarly, in ward No. 18, out of 507 distributed forms, only 118 were accepted, his petition said. This, according to the petitioner, has deprived a large number of eligible citizens of their statutory right to participate in the upcoming BMC elections....