Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora denies differences in poll body over code violation, says EC members not clones: Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on Saturday dismissed the controversy going around in the poll panel as “unsavoury and avoidable”. Reports said that there were differences in the internal functioning of the commission after it was reported that election commissioner Ashok Lavasa was maintaining distance from the meetings related to the model code of conduct violation cases. He had written three letters to the CEC demanding that minority decisions went unrecorded in the final orders of the poll body.
In a statement released by Arora, he noted that the three members of the EC — Sunil Arora, Ashok Lavasa and Sushil Chandra — are not expected to be “template or clones of each other,” adding that there have been times in the past that there were differences and it should always be there. His statement came after it was alleged that Lavasa had written to him demanding the minority decisions should also be considered in the final orders of code violation cases.
“It needs to be clarified categorically and unambiguously that this is purely an internal matter of ECI and as such any speculation, innuendoes and insinuations in this regard should be eschewed. It also needs to be mentioned that a meeting had already been scheduled on Tuesday, i.e., 21.5.2019 to discuss this and related matters,” the statement said.
The MCC is a set of guidelines for the contesting parties and their candidates to modulate their conduct in a prescribed manner.
Ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was given a clean chit six cases related to the code violation while Congress president Rahul Gandhi was given a clean chit in only one of the cases.
