15 percent of Tamil Nadu booths are critical of poll crimes

Chennai: As many as 9,027 polling booths of the total 60,473 in Tamil Nadu are classified as critical by the Election Commission, based on feedback from the revenue and police departments, a spokesperson at the office of the chief electoral officer here said on Monday. Villupuram district leads the list, with 954 polling booths identified as sensitive while Nagapattinam, with only 40, is the district with the least number of critical booths. The number of critical booths amounts to 15 per cent of the total booths in the state.

According to the officer, 32 companies of para military forces will arrive in TN on Thursday. “We will give one company each to every district. We have asked for 200 companies for deployment in the state before the election,” a senior state officer said. The police and revenue officials, will, on their part, start looking for evidence of expenditure by the candidates only after they file their nominations. “The police will be monitoring their activities until then. But thereafter, we will be looking for election related crimes and examining expenditure details of the candidates,” a police officer said.

The necessity to create a new and separate category for election crimes was felt after a recent meeting held by various policy stakeholders in the home ministry found that nationwide there was no representative data for these poll related offences.

“We in Tamil Nadu have the data separately. And nearly 3,000 cases, registered for election related crimes during the assembly polls in 2011, are pending in the court,” a police officer noted. Election related crimes include, inter and intra party clashes, attacks, killings, transport of illegal inducements, like liquor and cash, in the run-up to the polls, besides incidents of  booth capturing, firing and looting of EVMs.