RS poll: No breach of secrecy, says Returning Officer

Bhartesh Singh Thakur

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Chandigarh, June 10

The BJP and Independent candidate Kartikeya Sharma complained to Election Commission of India (ECI) for cancellation of votes of Congress MLAs — BB Batra and Kiran Choudhry — cast during the Rajya Sabha poll today.

They approached the ECI after Returning Officer RK Nandal rejected their claims based on video footage. Till the filing of this copy, the ECI was yet to deliver its verdict. But if the ECI rules for the cancellation of votes, it could lead to Kartikeya’s victory.

Batra was election agent of Congress candidate Ajay Maken and Choudhry is former Congress Legislative Party (CLP) leader and had served as minister too. Batra was among the first few voters. The authorised agents were sitting in cubicles one after the other. As Batra went to show his ballot paper to authorised agent Vivek Bansal (party’s state in-charge), JJP’s authorised agent Digvijay Chautala, who was sitting in the next cubicle, claimed that the ballot paper was shown to him. Then, other BJP leaders also made similar allegations.

The same thing happened with Choudhry too. She maintained that when she was showing her ballot paper to Bansal, Chautala tried to see it.

As per a complaint filed through his advocate, Kartikeya submitted before the ECI that both Batra and Choudhry had shown their preference of votes to several persons other than the authorised agent of the party, in violation of the secrecy of votes as provided in Rule 39-A read with Rule 70 of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961. It was submitted that both the incidents of violations were captured by the cameras installed for the purpose of election and various complaints were made by the BJP, JJP and Kartikeya but Returning Officer RK Nandal rejected the objections. In another complaint by Kartikeya’s election agent Venod Sharma and BJP candidate’s polling agent MLA Deepak Mangla, it was submitted that both the election observers were present and they were supposed to interfere in the complaint and marked ballot papers could have been cancelled.

Kartikeya too claimed that Returning Officer was not working for “conducting free and fair elections”. Maken in his representation to the ECI submitted that the sole agenda of the rivals’ complaint for cancellation of Congress MLAs votes was to defeat the process of “free and fair elections”. He said the Returning Officer after looking at videos gave the findings that “there is no breach of privacy/secrecy”. He said that complaint of Kartikeya and BJP was nothing but a weak and desperate attempt, in view of their impending defeat.