Gole Market

The nation?s first citizen will be the biggest of the many VIPs who will cast their vote at Gole Market, the constituency of Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

Published on: Nov 12, 2003, 14:08:00 IST

PTI | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The nation’s first citizen will be the biggest of the many VIPs who will cast their vote at Gole Market.

President APJ Abdul Kalam’s name has been recently included in the voters’ list for the seat. “There will be two polling booths inside the President’s estate and he will cast his vote in one of them,” said an official at the office of the Chief Electoral Officer. Kalam was earlier a voter at the Malviya Nagar seat.

Like the President, Lieutenant-Governor Vijai Kapoor too received his voter’s identity card for Gole Market recently.

Several well known leaders who stay in the Gole Market assembly area, however, are not voters at the seat. Among this group are Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani. “Apparently their names are in the rolls of the constituencies from where they contest the Lok Sabha elections,” said the official.

A dozen union ministers’ names feature in the voters' list for Gole Market. They include Sharad Yadav, Sangh Priya Gautam, Rajiv Pratap Rudi and Jaswant Singh.

Most Delhi MPs live in Gole Market, but their names don’t feature in the list. Union Labour Minister Sahib Singh Verma and Outer Delhi MLAs will cast their votes in Shalimar Bagh. Union Minister of State and Chandni Chowk MP Vijay Goel will vote at Chandni Chowk — his constituency. East Delhi MP Lal Bihari Tiwari’s name is in the list of the Gonda assembly seat.

Poll panel eye on ‘nomination yatras’

The Chief Electoral Officer has ordered videography of the filing of nomination papers. EC rules do not permit the use of more than three vehicles per nominee, and the order is an attempt to ensure they are abided by.

The problem that deputy commissioners (who have been tasked with carrying out the order) may face, however, is with zeroing in on vehicles that carry no visible signs of being part of a candidate’s ‘nomination yatra’ (flags, banners, etc.).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
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.Read More

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