NEW DELHI: Chief Election Commissioner T.N. Seshan has lashed out at former Cabinet Secretaries S. Rajagopalan and Zafar Saffulah.
In an interview, Mr, Seshan alleged that his predecessors, allowed the nation’s electoral situation to degenerate and come to such a pitiable state.
The CEC also lamented that he did not take many steps to ensure free and fair polls initially as he had taken in the recent past or was now taking. He attributed this to his “delayed brain.”
Mr, Seshan said that the two former Cabinet Secretaries and he had fundamental differences of stance, “They were formulating to me the stance of the political executive, ”he said, “It was not to my liking,” be added.
The CEC said, had there been cooperation, the country might have had better polls in 1992 and 1993, He described the attempts to subjugate the Election Commission as “extra ordinanly serious.”
According to Mr. Seshan, his greatest success as the CEC had been the November 1993 elections, in which “there were hundreds and thousands of women from rural areas, including women whom their religion wanted to put on a burga, came and told me they had never voted before,” and in which a senior politician told him that it had been the first time he had spent the least amount of money for election “because posters were not there, cutouts were not there, loudspeakers were not there, banners were not there.”
I now enforce the model code of conduct rather firmly, I keep asking myself why | didn’t do this for the “91 parliamentary elections… call it an attribute or a criticism of a delayed brain,” he said.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 28, 1994
