The Hindu : State EC disqualifies 12,320 candidates

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 12, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Kerala

State EC disqualifies 12,320 candidates

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM JAN. 11. The State Election Commission (EC) has disqualified 12,320 persons, who had contested the last panchayat and municipal elections and had failed to submit statement of election expenditure, from contesting the elections for five years from now.

The disqualified persons included tribal leader, C.K. Janu, (who had been defeated) and three sitting members. The members, who will lose their seats, are M. F. Johnson (Thalayolaparambu, Pothi Ward), Sreedharan Madhavan (Idukki- Chakkupallom, Menon Ward) and Ramachandran Thankappan (Palakkad- Sholayar, Sholayar Ward).

The Election Commissioner, N. Mohandas, told mediapersons that 1,300 of the disqualified persons were candidates in the municipal and city Corporation elections. Of the remaining, 144 had contested the elections to the District Panchayats, 795 to the block panchayats and 10,021 to the village panchayats.

The largest number of 1,500 persons had to be disqualified in Thiruvananthapuram district. The least was in Kasaragod district_ 217. The disqualification would come into effect from January 10, the date of notification of the disqualification in the official gazette.

The Election Commissioner said that all candidates had filed their statements only from 19 local self-Governments in eight districts. Many of those who had not filed the statements on expenditure were non-serious independent candidates. Many of them would have been fielded to divert votes.

To stem this trend, the Commission would be recommending to the Government measures such as increasing of the security deposit. Another suggestion was that a person should be allowed to contest from a ward only if he is a resident of that ward. Such a provision was there in Orissa, and that would bring down the number of candidates considerably. More than 60,000 persons had contested the elections last time.

Mr. Mohandas said the persons who had submitted false returns would also be disqualified. The procedure for this had only begun and disqualification would be done only on the basis of evidence that the candidate had exceeded the expenditure limit. The limit was Rs. 5,000 for village panchayats and municipalities, Rs. 10,000 for block panchayats and city Corporations and Rs. 30,000 for District Panchayats. The Commission was suggesting that it should have a vigilance set up to keep tags on expenditure by candidates during the elections.

He said that the disqualifications had been effected after serving notice on 15,509 persons who had failed to submit the statements to the designated officer within one month as stipulated in the Panchayat Raj Act and Municipalities Act. Their names would be marked in the voters list to prevent them from contesting the coming elections.

He said that the work on delimitation of Assembly and Parliamentary constituencies under the delimitation committee headed by Kuldip Singh had only begun. He was in charge of the work in the State. A committee having five MPs and five MLAs as members has been constituted to draw up the draft proposals. Decisions would be taken only after hearing is held on the draft proposal.

While there will be no change in number of constituencies in each State, the boundaries would change on the basis of population. The 1991 census figures were to be used for determining the boundaries. As far as possible, boundaries would be fixed following boundaries of administrative districts and development blocks.

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