New Delhi: Rejecting the demand of election commissioner Ashok Lavasa, the ‘Full Commission’ of Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday ruled that dissents and minority views in EC orders with regard to Model Code of Conduct (MCC) violations will not be made public and only majority view will be announced in the final order.
However, the ECI stressed that proceedings of the Commission meetings will be noted down including the views of all the commission members and will remain part of the official record.
“In the meeting of the Election Commission held today, i.e., 21.5.2019 regarding the issue of MCC, it was interalia decided that proceedings of the Commission meeting would be drawn including the views of all the Commission Members. Thereafter, formal instructions to this effect would be issued in consonance with extant laws/rules, etc,” the ECI said in a statement following the meeting.
The Full Commission comprises Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sunil Arora and fellow Commissioners Mr Lavasa and Mr Sushil Chandra. As per existing EC rules, while efforts should be made to have an unanimous decision, but in case of a dissent the majority (2:1) view will prevail.
Officials in the ECI clarified that the views of the ECI members were always recorded during the meetings irrespective of the fact whether they agreed on a particular issue or disagreed. However, when the final decision of the EC is conveyed only the majority view that forms the decision is announced.
“The status quo will be maintained. Dissent will not be made public but would form part of EC records as has been the practice,” an official told Asian Age.
The meeting on Tuesday was called by the CEC Sunil Arora after Mr Lavasa wrote a letter to him recusing himself from MCC meetings arguing that since minority views were not made public there was no point attending these sittings. Mr Lavasa is upset with the back to back clean chits given to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah.
