PENALISE PARTIES MAKING FRIVOLOUS COMPLAINTS: HARSIMRAT BADAL TO EC

Chandigarh April 19 – The SAD-BJP Bathinda candidate Ms. Harsimrat Kaur Badal today asked the Election Commission of India to fix stringent norms for punishing political parties and candidates who indulged in making false, fabricated and fantastic complaints against their opponent merely to gain cheap media publicity.
In her letter to the EC, Ms. Badal also called for specific time frame for deciding such complaints and definite penalties for complaints found to be frivolous. She said that the tendency among some political parties and candidates to deflect attention from their own weaknesses by leveling false allegations or raising a hue and cry about issues that had no relation to reality was on the rise and needed to be checked.
In her letter, the SAD-BJP candidate specifically expressed surprise over one of her rivals, Raninder Singh of the Congress, lodging a complaint with the EC on her alleged remarks that villages that did not vote for the ruling alliance in Bathinda would be denied government grants for development works. Raninder’s complaint, she said, was clearly the result of the Congress realization that almost all the Panchayats in the region had openly expressed their admiration for development works undertaken by the SAD-BJP government. “I can understand my brother Raninder’s desperation and I even sympathise with him but I would also like to advise him that a resort to lies or to a stray misleading media report is hardly going to bail him out of his difficulties. I am sure that if he were not contesting this election, even he would agree that the development undertaken by the Parkash Singh Badal-led government in Punjab has been phenomenal and without a precedent in the history of the state,” said Ms. Badal.