Election Commission gets cracking on errant politicians
The politicians are keeping the Election Commission on its toes. On Sunday, the EC reprimanded Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and issued notices to Home Minister P Chidambaram and BJP leader Jaswant Singh for poll code violations, reports Chetan Chauhan.
The Election Commission doesn’t take a break on Sundays. It reprimanded Samajwadi chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, and issued notices to Union home minister P Chidamabaram and BJP leader Jaswant Singh for poll code violations.
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The full EC, headed by Chief Election Commission N Gopalaswami, found Yadav’s reply to a notice issued to him last week unsatisfactory and advised him to be “more cautious and “exercise restrain”.
The commission had issued a notice to Yadav for threatening Dileep Ministhy, district magistrate of his Lok Sabha constituency Mainpuri, for confiscating firearms of his party workers.
The panel also sought an explanation from senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh for allegedly distributing money during a public meeting in Rajasthan’s Barmer district, where his son Manvendra Singh is a candidate.
The notice was issued on the basis of a report filed by Rajasthan’s Chief Electoral Officer Vinod Zutsi with a CD showing Singh distributing money.
A similar CD was telecast by most news channels last week.
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Singh has been asked to reply by 5 p.m. on Tuesday. Singh has admitted giving money but claimed it was his duty to help the poor and it was not a violation of the model code of conduct.
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Singh has been asked to reply by 5 p.m. on Tuesday. Singh has admitted giving money but claimed it was his duty to help the poor and it was not a violation of the model code of conduct.
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The commission also sought explanation from Home Minister P. Chidambaram by Monday afternoon for allegedly offering poll sops during a security review meeting he took in Rajasthan. The notice was issued following a BJP allegation that Chidambaram, during an official visit to the State in the last week of March, had taken up electoral issues.
The complaint alleged the Home Minister talked about granting citizenship to displaced Hindus from Pakistan and additional facilities for passengers travelling by ‘Thar Express’.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
