EC shunts out Pandian’s wife after claims of bid to influence voters

NEW DELHI: Election Commission on Thursday ordered the transfer of

Sujata R Kartikeyan

, commissioner-cum-secretary of

Mission Shakti

in

Odisha

to a non-public dealing department with immediate effect. Sources said the action was taken based on complaints of alleged misuse of public office by the officer. Earlier in the day, BJP had complained to the Election Commission against Sujata for allegedly “influencing voters through SVEEP for electoral gains for BJD.” Sujata is the wife of former IAS officer and BJD functionary V K Pandian.

Both BJP and BJD are locked in a tight contest in Odisha, after alliance talks between the two collapsed close to the polls.
BJP had demanded that she not be assigned any public dealing duty till the conclusion of the Lok Sabha and the Odisha assembly polls. Earlier, BJP also lodged a complaint with EC against Congress for no effective action taken against Rahul Gandhi and party president Mallikarjun Kharge for “continuous violations of MCC”. A BJP delegation comprising finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, skill development minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Sudhanshu Trivedi and Om Pathak met EC.

Its complaint against Congress demanded action and “meticulous scrutiny of patently false narratives”. BJP claimed that despite earlier representations to EC, Congress has continued “spreading falsehoods through not only their public utterances, but also through doctored and morphed video and surrogate advertisements” against BJP. The special cell of Delhi police on Sunday registered an FIR after the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), filed a complaint about a doctored video of home minister Amit Shah where his statements indicating a commitment to abolish quota for Muslims on religious ground in Telangana were changed to make it seem that he was advocating scrapping of all reservations.
The complaint cited three instances against Gandhi for “peddling disinformation” which included his address at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu in April for his remarks that BJP will change the Constitution, while the third instance is the Gandhi scion’s speech in Bhind in Madhya Pradesh where he said “BJP will end reservations.”

The complaint also claimed that following in Gandhi’s footstep, Kharge and other Congress and INDIA bloc leaders “are spearheading their campaign based on patently false allegations and wrong information through their public speeches, as well as by circulating morphed videos…” while demanding an FIR against Gandhi and his “unconditional public apology.”