EC notice to five Shimla LS candidates including Congress, BJP over election expenditure

The Election Commission has issued notices to five candidates contesting from the Shimla Lok Sabha segment for not submitting details of their election expenditure.

The candidates who have been issued the notices are Congress’ Dhani Ram Shandil, Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Suresh Kashyap, Vikram Singh of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Manoj Raghuvanshi of All India Forward Bloc and Ravi Kumar, who is contesting as an Independent.

All the candidates have been given 48 hours to submit their replies after receiving the notice.

If the candidates fail to provide their details within three days, then the EC would assume that they have not maintained their expenditure registers.

The poll panel has urged all the candidates to submit the details of their actual election expenditure.

The commission has kept the total limit of expenditure at ₹70 lakh and every candidate is supposed to comply with the rules.

To ensure fair elections, the election commission has set up various teams to monitor the election expenditures of the candidates.

These teams keep an eye on the expenditure incurred by the candidates and maintain shadow registers. The candidates also maintain their registers of the expenditures during elections and those are compared with the shadow registers by the expenditure supervisors with assistant expenditure supervisors on specified dates decided by the election commission.

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The expenditure supervisor of Shimla, NK Bansal said, “The inspection of the expenditure registers of the candidates of Shimla parliamentary constituency was done on Thursday. Notices have been issued by the election officer of Shimla to those candidates who failed to provide the correct information of their election expenditure.”

“These candidates have been given a time of three days to submit their expenditure details to the expenditure supervisors, else it will be assumed that the candidates are not keeping their expenditure details as per the guidelines of the Election Commission of India,” he added.

“Further proceedings will be done after receiving the answers of the notice from the candidates,” Bansal said.

The expenditure supervisor has not received any detail from independent candidate Ravi Kumar, while Shamsher Singh, who is contesting elections from Shimla as Rashtriya Azad Manch is the only candidate whose expenditure report is correct.

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