| In a related development, the government has opined
informally that it would not be prudent to promulgate an Ordinance,
as had been reported in a section of the Press today, to empower the
EC to ban all sorts of opinion and exit polls.
The government's thinking is based on the fact that promulgation
of an ordinance to empower the EC might not go down too well with
the apex court at a time when the SC is hearing a case on related
issues like advertising.
However, legal experts point out such a scenario is possible if
the EC petitions Supreme Court on the issue of exit and opinion
polls on the ground that it does have adequate power to take action
in this regard and the court, in turn, gives a directive to the
government.
Yesterday, at an all-party meet called by the EC, the political
consensus on opinion polls was to clamp down on such activities,
while allowing exit polls only after a certain period of time.
Meanwhile, tomorrow the Commission would also apprise the apex
court on its preparedness on monitoring political advertising on
the electronic medium and the mechanism that is likely to be adopted.
Though even a proposed seven-day clearance period may leave political
parties with too little a time before campaigning for the first
phase of polls come to an end on 18 April (actual polling takes
places on 20 April), something would still be better than none,
a senior political leader with a national party pointed out.
Also read:
10-day
clearance period for ads a no-no: parties
EC
considers pre-censoring political ads
|
