Yechury asks if EC took action against BJP over NaMo TV expenses during Lok Sabha polls

CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury has shot off a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora asking whether the Election Commission has taken action against the BJP for not including the expenses incurred for running a campaign through NaMo TV during Lok Sabha polls.

In his letter sent on Monday, he said 'NaMo TV' had surfaced during the elections in "contravention of the existing law and then disappeared mysteriously" after the polls and the EC itself had acknowledged that the channel run by DTH platforms was paid for by the BJP.

However, he said the BJP did not show this in its returns to the EC on its expenditure account, which is an "outright electoral offence".

"The immediate question that arises, has the EC initiated any penal action against the BJP on this account? If not, why not? I dare say, the absence of absolute unambiguous firm action seriously questions the EC’s responsibility for ensuring a level-playing field, not to speak of weeding out electoral malpractices with a heavy hand," Yechury wrote.

He also found fault with the social media campaign of the EC, saying that an advertising and social media company owned by a BJP office-bearer was hired by the Maharashtra Chief Electoral Officer to issue election-related online advertisements during the 2019 Assembly elections.

It has also come to light that the EC itself had authorised government bodies to appoint the same social media agency for the 2019 elections, he said. "With its independent Constitutional status, the authority of Article 324 is a recognition of the EC’s responsibility for ensuring fair play. Therefore, it becomes all the more necessary that EC is not only fair but also explicitly appears to be so," he added.

With the Bihar Assembly elections round the corner, Yechury also demanded the shelving of plans for allowing digital campaign during upcoming Bihar elections.

He said most political parties have opposed the proposal of the Bihar Chief Electoral Officer that the entire electoral exercise in the state should be held on the virtual platform because of "raging" Covid-19 pandemic "not only because of the issue of a huge access deficit but massive financial resources that would have to be deployed" to connect with the voters.

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Arguing that the BJP has massive resources while other parties would be lagging behind, he cited the comments of Union Home Minister Amit Shah on the eve of 2019 Lok Sabha elections during which he said that the BJP has a network of 32 lakh WhatsApp groups and can make any message viral within hours.

Ahead of the Bihar polls, Yechury said the BJP has kicked off a virtual election campaign by putting up 72,000 LED TV monitors for Shah’s speech.

"After holding 60 virtual rallies, the BJP has claimed that its election campaign efforts would involve 9,500 IT Cell heads who will coordinate 72,000 WhatsApp groups, one for each polling booth, of which 50,000 have been formed in the last two months. The amount of expenditure that would be involved to put together such manpower for a technology-driven system is simply mind-boggling," he wrote.

Yechury said even with figures for corporate contribution available in the public domain before the "anonymous funding through electoral bonds came into vogue", it was clear that the gap between the BJP and all other parties added together in securing corporate poll funding has widened manifold.

"Obviously, with the anonymous corporate funds without any upper ceiling, will certainly be the death knell for electoral democracy," he said, recalling that the Election Commission itself has told the Supreme Court that electoral bonds will signal “serious repercussions on the transparency aspect" of political funding.

He said several experts were of the view that if the electoral bonds scheme had been introduced to bring about greater transparency and the government must not restrain from allowing details of such donations to be made public.

"Therefore, even if we go by the Commission’s contention on the electoral bond regime in its affidavit before the Supreme Court, it becomes obvious there can be no free and fair poll, not to speak of a level-playing field," Yechury said.