BJP, Congress seek more time to reply to EC notices over PM Modi, Rahul Gandhi speeches
While the BJP has asked for another week to respond to the poll body's notice, the Congress has sought an additional 14 days.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday sought another week to respond to the poll body's notice to party president JP Nadda about violations of the Mode Code of Conduct by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to a senior EC official. Follow full coverage of the Lok Sabha elections here.
Similarly, the Congress had initially asked for time until 5pm on Monday but has now asked for 14 more days to respond to the notice to Mallikarjun Kharge. The deadline to respond to the notices was 11am on April 29.
On April 25, the ECI issued notices seeking responses to complaints of violations of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge , underlining that campaign speeches of star campaigners need to be judged “at a higher threshold of compliance”.
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The notices came days after Modi’s comments at an election rally in Rajasthan on Sunday wherein he alleged that the Congress intended to redistribute public wealth to Muslims. Opposition leaders targeted Modi over the comments. Kharge called the remarks “hate speech”, and said that Modi had “lowered the dignity of political discourse”.
In the notice to BJP chief JP Nadda, ECI cited the representations of the Congress, the Communist Party of India (CPI), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation or CPI(ML). “You [Nadda] are also directed, as president of the national party to bring to the notice of all your star campaigners to set high standards of political discourse and observe provisions of MCC in letter and spirit,” the notice said.
The notice to Kharge referred to the BJP’s complain and sought a response to the complaint against Rahul Gandhi’s April 18 speech in Kerala in which he had said that Modi was giving speeches advocating an idea for “one nation, one language, one religion”. The BJP accused Gandhi of “derisive and obnoxious utterances” against Modi.
In the notices, the poll body also underlined that star campaigners were expected to contribute to a higher quality of discourse by providing an all-India perspective, which sometimes gets distorted in the heat of the contests at the local level. “Thus, the expectation from star campaigners is to provide corrective action or a sort of healing touch, when [the] intensity of local campaign disrupts or inadvertently crosses over such boundaries.”
