Election Commission not in favour of early polls in Telangana

Hyderabad: The Election Commission is reportedly averse to holding early polls for  the Telangana Legislative Assembly in December along with four states  as sought by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao. The EC is learnt to have cited “three reasons” which are obstructing early elections for Telangana state when chief adviser to the government Rajiv Sharma met its officials three days ago. The first being the EC’s  schedule for summary revision of electoral rolls in Telangana, which ends on January 1, 2019, the second issue being that seven mandals in Khammam, w-hich were merged into AP, continue to be represented by TS MLAs and they are yet to be notified in AP constituencies.  The third reason is the need to break the routine of “joint polls” for the Lok Sabha and Assembly, being held in Tel-angana since 1999 and the EC was not satisfied with the explanations given for this by TS officials.

TRS party sources said that it was in this backdrop that the CM rushed to Delhi to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting his help in sorting out ‘technical issues’ with the EC and ensure early polls for Telangana. Interestingly, the EC also pointed out the letter submitted to it by the TRS just a month ago expressing its complete support to simultaneous polls for the LS and Assembly on the ground that separate elections were resulting in unnecessary expenditure for political parties, wastage of public money and hampering administration and questioned why the TRS was pitching for separate elections now.

Officials also pointed out that even if Telangana Assembly was dissolved by September 10, there would be time of six months to hold elections, which will be till March 10, while the LS polls are scheduled in April 2019. This, they said, may lead to legal issues if someone moves courts if separate polls were held for the state which may result in additional expenditure of Rs 3,000 crore just for the sake of one month.

The joint elections for Lok Sabha and Assembly were being held consecutively since 1999 in Undivided AP. Though AP was bifurcated in 2014, the elections were conducted for Undivided AP in April/May 2014 since the formation of Telangana State came into effect from June 2014. The other issues pointed out by ECI officials were that for the first time VVPAT machines were being used on a full scale along with EVMs for Assembly elections in four states  in December and for this, the staff were being trained. It would be difficult to train poll staff in Telangana for December polls. Also issues were also raised with the deployment of IAS, IPS, I-T officers as election observers for Telangana while ECI had already initiated this process for four states.

However, the TS government is trying it’s best to convince the ECI to hold early elections in December. The IT minister’s statement on Sunday too gave hints in this regard. “Clarity on early elections will come in the next 7-10 days. There is no clarity whether early elections will be held or not as of now,” Mr Rama Rao said. His statement shows that even TRS chief and CM K.Chandrasekhar Rao will not be in a position to give clarity on early polls in the massive public meeting being held by TRS on the city outskirts on September 2.