‘Alert’ citizens keep EC lines busy with complaints

A day after the Election Commission (EC) asked the state Congress to pull out its advertisement for free laptops from its official website, the Vadodara electoral office received a complaint that the logo of the scheme was not yet removed from the website.

A person in Dabhoi complained on Saturday that someone had sent by courier Congress's ghar-nu-ghar (affordable houses) scheme forms for distribution in a local college.

With model code of conduct in force with the announcement of poll dates, the expenditure monitoring cells of local electoral offices in different districts are flooded with complaints from "alert" citizens who are quick to blow the whistle on political parties for possible violation of code of conduct.

Electoral officers say these callers on the toll-free number maintained by them generally appear to be the supporters of one party or another, but they nevertheless serve the officers in exposing possible violations of the model code of conduct.

"We forward the complaints to the officials concerned in the respective regions from where we receive complaints," an electoral officer said.

On Tuesday, Vadodara electoral office received complaints from a person that Vadodara MP Balkrishna Shukla was likely to attend and inaugurate a function at a college in Dabhoi.

Complaints about forms of ghar-nu-ghar scheme reaching by couriers have been made from different centres. The expenditure monitoring cell in Vadodara received the first complaint on October 9 from Dabhoi. A few days later, the cell received a similar complaint from Pavi Jetpur.

A person called up from a village in Dahod district saying a BJP worker was allegedly promising villages concrete houses in place of mud houses and had even taken photographs of villagers in front of their houses.

Then, there were complaints about advertisement of a "particular political party" being shown on a state bus in Ahmedabad and two BJP hoardings being put up in Savasi village near Vadodara.

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