New Delhi, February 21
Faced with a fresh controversy over its proposal to dilute the Election Commission’s powers by taking away the model code of conduct from its purview and giving it statutory backing, an embarrassed government today rushed to clarify that it was not considering any such move.

However, the government’s denial flew in the face of the agenda papers of tomorrow’s meeting of the GoM on corruption which state that the Union legislative secretary will make a presentation before the panel on the proposal to give statutory status to the model code of conduct.

Even the strong denial put out by the Ministry of Personnel and Training today admits that “incidental references were made to the issue of the code of conduct” when the secretary, legislative department, made a presentation before the panel at its last meeting on September 30 on the issue of state funding of elections.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who heads this GoM, had agreed with Law Minister Salman Khurshid’s suggestion at that meeting that this proposal be discussed and had gone on to comment that the model code of conduct was “one of the biggest excuses to stall development projects.”

If this proposal is accepted, Election Commission would no longer have powers to check poll violations as these would then be tried in courts which would be a long process. The move has elicited strong objections from Election Commission.

Khurshid, who is involved in a running battle with Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi, today did a flip-flop on this issue. He first said there is no such item on the GoM agenda but went on to add that the proposal on the code of conduct may be considered as part of the electoral reforms if political parties want it at an all-party meeting the Prime Minister is slated to convene.

The DoPT statement explained that since the state funding of elections is one of the mandates given to the GoM on corruption, this issue has been discussed periodically by the panel and the Law Ministry has been updating its members on the several initiatives on this subject and other proposals on electoral reforms. The Law Ministry, it was stated, had been asked to make specific recommendations on the state funding of elections for consideration by the GoM.

“The GoM has not made any recommendation to make the model code of conduct statutory or take it outside the purview of the commission,” the government clarified.

The government’s clarification comes in the backdrop of simmering tensions between Khurshid and the Chief Election Commissioner. The Law Minister was forced to apologise to the CEC recently when Quraishi had sought President Pratibha Patil’s intervention after Khurshid challenged the commission at an election meeting in Uttar Pradesh and reiterated his promise to provide sub-quotas for minorities even though he had already been censured in this regard.