NEW DELHI: The Congress on Saturday jumped over a leaked letter of Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa, a former union finance secretary, showing the rot in the poll body as he opts out of its full bench meetings in protest of no recording of his dissent on multiple occasions on giving clean chits to Prime Minister Modi and BJP President Amit Shah for model code violations.
Lavasa wrote the letter to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on May 4 and since then the EC’s full bench has not met causing the poll body’s dysfunction at a time it is engrossed with the Lok Sabha elections with the counting only five days away. The Rajasthan-born Lavasa is the Haryana cadre IAS officer of 1980 batch. He was made the election commissioner on retirement last year.
Congress chief spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala asked whether it is an election commission or “election omission,” with a straight question: “Will EC save the embarrassment by recording Lavasa’s dissent notes?”
He tweeted and told a Press conference here on Saturday that “erosion of institutional integrity is the hallmark of Modi Govt — SC judges going public, RBI Guv resigning, CBI director getting removed, CVC giving vacuous reports and now dividing Election Commission.”
