The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday accused the Congress of indulging in corrupt practices amounting to bribery over the latter’s ‘Ghar Ghar Guarantee’ outreach programme, and has asked the Election Commission (EC) to put a stop to it.
In its memorandum to the EC, the BJP said the initiative was unveiled on April 3 by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and that its workers are distributing “guarantee cards” to households, presenting them application papers for accessing the party’s promised benefits.
“To further confound the wrong, the cards bear the promissory signatures of prominent leaders of the Indian National Congress, namely Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge, as an official endorsement,” the letter said.
The BJP claimed that this was tantamount to manipulation of voters’ trust and misrepresentation of guarantee cards as legitimate instruments for accessing promised “freebies, largesse and utopian promises”.
A form of discrimination
“Allowing such practices openly contradicts the principles of free and fair elections, and sets a precedent where only registered political supporters may be entitled to government schemes, and not the remaining ones,” it said.
Citing the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) and the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the BJP said such a campaign by the Opposition party falls under corrupt practices and bribery. It also sought registration of criminal cases against Congress members distributing the cards.
The BJP said that this campaign was similar to another “surrogate campaign” by the Congress during the Rajasthan Assembly polls last year to bribe and mislead the voters. The EC had at that time taken a “serious view” of the matter, the BJP said.
In another complaint, the BJP urged the poll watchdog to transfer and immediately relieve several “politically-aligned” officers, including the chief secretary and the DGP, in Andhra Pradesh where the Assembly election is being held alongside the Lok Sabha polls. The party made several other demands for free and fair polls in the southern State.
