Free, fair polls priority: EC chief

July 31, 2002
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By Kishore Nepal

KATHMANDU, July 31: The Chief Election Commissioner Achyut Narayan Rajbhandary has said that the main responsibility and priority of the Election Commission at present is to hold the general elections as scheduled in a fair and free manner. The present government has already announced that the General Election will be held on November . At this juncture, apart from holding the elections as scheduled, no other issue is within the priority list of the Election Commission.

Informing that a congenial environment is being constructed for holding of the election, Chief Election Commissioner Rajbhandary said, “The main concern of the Commission at present is to hold the election in a peaceful manner. We are holding talks with the police and security personnel regarding this. The responsible officers of the Royal Nepalese Army and the Nepal Police have assured Commission that the elections will be held in a peaceful manner. The Commission has felt that a marked improvement has been made in the law and order sector in the past few months”.

“We are verifying the electorates’ list and also preparing other contingencies required to hold the election., the Chief Election Commissioner said while talking to this scribe. “We have also started to communicate with the representatives from within the country and abroad who will come as observers for the election,” he further added.

When asked about the controversy within the ruling party that has been filed at the Election Commission, the Chief Election Commissioner said,” The issue has come before us. There are processes of its own to solve this issue. ‘The Commission will solve this in the proper time. But I will say again, our main priority is to hold the election which has been scheduled for November….,’ he said.

Recalling a similar controversy which had come, before the election was held, in the Commission some years back regarding the Jana Morcha Party, he said, “It had taken the Commission three to four months to resolve the issue even then”.

Chief Election Commissioner Rajbhandary said, “The Commission is sensitive towards the fact that this controversy must be resolved soon. This is a political issue. But this has to be looked from a legal angle too. At present, both the sides have presented their own claims. The Commission is studying this. How long it will take to resolve this problem, the issue itself will determine. The Commission does not have any formula to resolve the problem just because someone wants it to be resolved fast”.

It may be recalled that when prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba had announced the dissolution of the House of Representatives on Jesth 8, the then leadership of the Nepali Congress had ousted PM Deuba from the ordinary membership of the party four days later. After that, when the party had sent the list of party officials in the process of registering the party for the election, the name of PM Deuba had not been included.

According to the article 18 of the Constitution of the Nepali Congress party, the leader of the Parliamentary party and the Prime Minister is an ex-officio member of the Central Working Committee of the party. Though the then party president Girija Prasad Koirala had nominated PM Deuba to the CWC of the party before he was elected the leader of the Parliamentary Party of the Nepali Congress, he was a member of the CWC also because he was the Parliamentary Party’s leader.

According to the constitution of the Nepali Congress there is no provision to oust the Prime Minister from his post. As only the leader of the Parliamentary Party can be the Prime Minister and as there is separate regulations for this body, the Prime Minister can only be governed by the Parliamentary Party.

According to legal experts, the present controversy is related only with the Constitution and the House of Representatives regulations. As the prerogative to seek a fresh mandate lies only with the Prime Minister and the right to continue to remain as the leader of the Parliamentary Party remains with that person, the interference of the party in governmental affairs is not legal.

On condition of anonymity, a legal expert expressed the view that the constitution of a political party is no different from the regulations of any non-governmental organisation. The regulations of such type of organisations are limited only to the management of the institutions. A precedence has already been set in similar cases between Prashant Maharjan versus the Election Commission regarding the symbol “Madal” and also in a similar case between Kanchan Pudasaini and the Family Planning Association of Nepal.

“These sort of controversies has not been seen in any other part of the world. Even when such issues have come to the fore, they are resolved on the basis of political majority. When a similar controversy had come up in India between Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Nijalingappa, the then Election Commission had ruled in favour of Mrs. Gandhi due to the fact that the majority had been on the side of the former in the party’s general assembly.

The legal expert also opined that the status of the president of any political party is no more than that of any manager. Just recently in India, the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party Jana Krishnamurthy was made a minister after he was removed from the post of party president and a minister Venkat Naidu was made the party’s president. In a parliamentary democracy, the role of the leader of the Parliamentary Party is decisive.