President tells warring ECs to patch up

NEW DELHI, Dec 16: An early end is in sight to the unseemly row between Chief Election Commissioner M S Gill and his colleague G V G Krishn...

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NEW DELHI, Dec 16: An early end is in sight to the unseemly row between Chief Election Commissioner M S Gill and his colleague G V G Krishnamurthy, with President K R Narayanan asking them to resolve their differences “amicably”.

The President gave this advice to Krishnamurthy when the latter met him this morning for an hour. With the Lok Sabha polls a mere two months away, the work of the Commission was in danger of being thrown completely out of gear with the fracas that erupted among the senior Commission members.

With Krishnamurthy going off on nine days of “protest leave” in high dudgeon, and Gill, taking recourse to farming in Madhya Pradesh, officials at the Nirvachan Sadan headquarters of the Commission here were totally at a loss.

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But saner counsel appears to have prevailed. The President’s view that the polls be conducted in a “harmonious atmosphere” seemed, to outward appearances, to have hit home.

Krishnamurthy told journalists soon after his meeting with the President that he had given an assurance of his “full and complete cooperation” as a member of the constitutional body. However, he remained noncommittal about terminating his “protest leave”.

Despite his assurances to the President, Krishnamurthy did not attend an emergency meeting of the Commission this afternoon. A notice about the meeting had been sent to his residence this morning.

At the meeting, the CEC and the third member of the Commission, J M Lyngdoh, took a number of decisions relating to the logistics of conducting the general elections. The Commission issued directions to central and state education departments and education boards to keep teachers free for a month-long period starting from February 15.

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A statement issued by the Commission after the meeting said the month between February 15 and March 15 would be the “peak period for electoral activities” for conducting the general elections during which the services of teachers would be required for election-related training and the actual conduct of poll and counting of votes. School buildings would be used as polling counting centres.

In separate letters to Union Education secretary P R Dasgupta, Chief Secretaries of all states and to the chairmen of the Indian Council of Secondary Education and the Central Board of Secondary Education, the EC has conveyed its decision regarding the poll. The schedule of the elections will however, be announced only after the publication of the full revised voting list on January 5.

Showing that it means to get tough on any instance of “misdemeanour” by poll officials, the Commission today ordered the immediate shifting of the District Magistrates in three districts of Bihar and one each in Tripura and Mizoram. The Commission statement said this action followed “adverse reports” about the conduct of these five officials during the last general elections.

In another significant decision to ensure a level playing field, the EC has directed Central and State governments to stop all discretionary quotas allotted to Union and State ministers, MPs and members of legislative assemblies till the poll process is completed.