By IANS
Ahmedabad : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Friday charged the Election Commission (EC) of adopting different standards in dealing with the complaints made by the party and with those made by the Congress over poll campaign speeches.
In a letter to the EC, the BJP said while the commission had promptly issued a notice to the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi seeking explanation on his campaign speech, it was yet to act on its “substantive complaints” against Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh even though they had been filed Dec 2 and 4.
Stopping short of accusing the EC of showing bias, the party said the poll body entrusted with the task of conducting free and fair elections should have initiated action on its own over the kind of “expressions” the congress leaders had used in their speeches during campaigning.
The letter said: “When the Election Commission releases a notice against Modi to the national media and does not act on a substantive complaint against Sonia Gandhi and Digvijay Singh, it amounts to an ‘unfair interference in the free and fair conduct of the poll’.”
Arun Jaitley, BJP general secretary, who released the letter to the reporters here, said the complaint against Gandhi could neither be suppressed nor censored.
No reasonable person would accept that the use of phrases such as “merchant of death” and “Hindu terrorism” did not amount to violation of the model poll conduct, he said.
Jaitley also added the letter to the EC was not in any way a prelude to Saturday’s expected submission of Modi’s response to the EC’s notice.
The chief minister was quite capable of handling the issue in his own way, he said.