Orders issued by the Election Commission of India (EC) giving a clean chit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah, in cases pertaining to violations of the model code of conduct, have no record of the lone dissenting view by one of the election commissioners, according to people aware of the matter who asked not to be named.
Dubbing this a deviation from the norm, an official privy to the rules and developments in the poll panel said the dissenting view is supposed to be a part of the final order and made public. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said another digression from the norm is that the poll panel, upon receiving complaints against the PM and Shah, did not issue show-cause notices seeking their response.
According to a second official, election commissioner Ashok Lavasa differed with the majority view in five different complaints of model code violations against Modi and Shah. As the rules allow for the order to be issued on the basis of a majority, the PM and Shah were given clean chits in all the cases. HT has seen two of these orders and there was no mention of a dissenting voice in them.
“In cases of model code violations, the commission has to put on record the complaint, the response from the person against whom the complaint is made, and the final order, whether it is unanimous or with a dissenting view. It is always a detailed order,” said a former chief election commissioner (CEC) on condition of anonymity.
{{/usCountry}}“In cases of model code violations, the commission has to put on record the complaint, the response from the person against whom the complaint is made, and the final order, whether it is unanimous or with a dissenting view. It is always a detailed order,” said a former chief election commissioner (CEC) on condition of anonymity.
{{/usCountry}}Referring to the issue of show-cause notices being issued, the former CEC said: “Cases pertaining to MCC [model code of conduct] violations have to take into account the laws of natural justice; the accused has to be given a chance to file a reply. The final order is based on the inquiry of the poll panel and the reply submitted by the accused; so a show-cause notice has to be issued.”
CEC Sunil Arora and election commissioner Lavasa did not respond to queries from HT seeking comments.
The first official said the issue of dissent not being put on record has been “taken up with the commission”.
“The official who gave the dissenting view has written to the commission, seeking to know why his view has not been put on record,” the official said.
However, another EC official had earlier suggested that since decisions on model code of conduct cases were not quasi-judicial, the dissent was not recorded.
Modi has been given clean chits in all of six cases so far — for speeches in Barmer, Varanasi, Patan, Nanded, Latur and Wardha; while Shah has been cleared for speeches in Nagpur and Krishna Nagar.
The Supreme Court had given the poll watchdog time till May 6 to dispose of all the complaints while listening to a petition by Congress MP Sushmita Dev, who had accused the poll body of inaction.
Responding to the Congress’s allegation of bias by the EC, Modi said on Saturday: “These are all excuses with which they want to explain away their imminent defeat. They are like the batsman who blames the umpire upon being clean bowled. They also remind me of the student, who flunks in examination and blames his failure on everything except his own lack of preparedness.”
In the letter addressed to Randeep Surjewala, incharge of the Congress’s communication department, the EC on Monday last week said it examined 11 pages of the speech made by PM Modi in Latur and found no violations. The letter makes no mention of whether the order is unanimous or not.
The poll panel concluded last week that PM Modi’s speech at Latur in Maharashtra on April 9, in which he had appealed to first-time electors to dedicate their vote to Pulwama martyrs and to the soldiers who carried out the Balakot air strike, did not violate the model code. The poll panel had twice issued advisories to political parties to avoid referring to or using pictures of soldiers for election propaganda.
On Saturday, the poll panel cleared another speech by the PM pertaining to his rally in Patan, Gujarat, on April 21, when he said that he had warned Pakistan of dire consequences if it did not return Indian Air Force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman. The Supreme Court has instructed the election commission to clear all cases of model code violations against the PM and Shah by May 6.
Last week, EC also cleared the PM for his speech in Wardha, where he suggested that Congress president Rahul Gandhi is contesting from a second seat in Kerala’s Wayanad, where the “minority is majority”, apparently because Muslims and Christians make up almost half of the electorate in the constituency.
Gandhi, who has been given a clean chit by the EC for his speech in Jabalpur where he made a reference to Shah as a “murder accused”, has been served a notice for his April 23 speech in Madhya Pradesh’s Shahdol, where he said that Modi has made a new law in which there is a line that says tribals can be shot at, referring to the draft Indian Forest act.