New Delhi, April 5
The Supreme Court today gave three
days time to the Election Commission (EC) to finetune its guidelines to control
the telecast of slanderous political programmes on TV as part of poll campaign
and even indicated that telecast of offending advertisements can be made an
electoral offence, if the commission so desired.
“Personal remarks against one
leader or the other and one party and the other is not democracy. We will make
it an electoral offence under Representation of People’s Act in a judgement even
tomorrow,” a Bench, headed by the Chief Justice Mr V.N. Khare told EC counsel
K.K. Venugopal.
The Bench having Mr Justice S.B. Sinha and Mr Justice S.H.
Kapadia as the other two judges told the EC counsel “if you require pre-censor
of the ads, we will issue a direction to the Union Government. Any modality you
require to monitor the ads on TV please tell us.”
The court asked the EC to
place the guidelines before it by April 8 when further hearing of the matter
will resume.
When Venugopal told the Bench that the commission faced the
difficulty of multiplicity of litigation on such issues as various High Courts
from time to time ask the commission to file replies, the Chief Justice said “we
will guard you in your efforts to clean the dirt and dust in electronic media.”
In the very outset of the argument on Union Information and Broadcasting
Ministry’s appeal against the Andhra Pradesh High Court order allowing the
telecast of political ads on TV and cable networks, the EC counsel sought
further time to evolve modalities to monitor the political ads, saying the task
was daunting.
He said the commission had to guard against 53 TV news channels,
10 major multi-service cable operators, 33,000 local cable operators, six
national and 45 regional parties and 702 registered unrecognised political
parties. Besides, activity of each of nearly 5,000 contesting candidate has to
be monitored, Venugopal said adding the guidelines had to be framed by keeping
this in mind.
Solicitor General Kirit Raval, appearing for the Centre told the
Bench that the government wanted that the election campaign was conducted
cleanly and the court’s intervention was welcomed by every one.
To court’s
query about the inclusion of the cost of political ads in candidates’ election
expenditure, EC counsel said the earlier provision regarding this had been
deleted from the Representation of People’s Act by an amendment last year.
The
government counsel said if the expenditure was included in the candidate’s
expenses, it would have wide ramifications. “But whatever monitoring (about ads)
is required, it should be done,” he said.
Describing the High Court order as
bad in law, the EC counsel said political parties had been amassing huge funds
before every election and it was the main reason for “corrupting the poll
process”.
The ban on political ads on electronic media was aimed at preventing
the use of “money power” and provide level playing field to every candidate,
Venugopal said adding many western democracies had banned such ads.
