Supreme Court notice to EC on complaint of poll code violation against PM, Amit Shah
The Supreme Court has refused to take up Congress lawmaker Sushmita Dev’s complaint of poll code violation against PM Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah
The Supreme Court will on Tuesday issued a notice to the Election Commission on a Congress lawmaker’s petition seeking directions to the poll body to act against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah for alleged repeated violations (the petition mentions 40) of the model code of conduct (MCC).
The notice came even as the EC informed the court that commission was taking up the matter. “EC can pass any order they want,” a bench of CJI Ranjan Gogoi, Justice SK kaul and Justice Kurian Joseph said, while posting the matter for May 2.
Sushmita Dev, who is a Parliament member from Assam’s Silchar, had accused EC of sitting on complaints related to the MCC violations against the two. In her petition before the SC, Dev accused Modi and Shah of hate speeches and using armed forces for “political propaganda”.
On Monday morning Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi mentioned Dev’s petition before a Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi-led bench and sought an urgent hearing, which was allowed. “Why do not you mention the names clearly,” Gogoi asked him when the senior lawyer refrained from taking the names of Shah and Modi. Specifically, Dev’s petition claims the BJP leaders used the Pulwama terror attack and India’s air strikes against terror camps in Pakistan in their campaigns.
It also alleges that some of their statements are a “clear attempt to pollute and destroy the political discourse so as to influence the outcome of the election through unfair means”.
“…the Prime Minister and the party in power have for the past five years fostered and cultivated an atmosphere of communal tension for their petty political gains. It was, therefore, unsurprising when he and the BJP President continued with this practice even after the MCC was enforced,” said Dev’s petition. Dev said EC has acted against various opposition leaders by banning them from campaigning but failed to act against the two despite the Congress’s complaints.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has approached EC against MCC violations by Gandhi twice; once on April 12 by defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and then on Monday by union ministers Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Vijay Goel, as well as Rajya Sabha MP GVL Narasimha Rao.