EC has done super job in smooth conduct of polls: Vijay Dev

NEW DELHI: Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Vijay Dev emphasised that Election Commission of India has done super job in smooth conduct of polls of the largest democracy of the World, but they have lot to do. Vijay Dev was addressing a symposium, which was organised by Chief Electoral Office, Delhi on the occasion of International Day of Democracy on "Challenges to Electoral Democracy".

The Delhi Chief Electoral Officer(CEO) said : "We have to rise to the expectations of citizens in terms of decriminalising the politics, eradicating influences of bribery and inducements, ensuring transparency in the funding of political parties, ensuring inner party democracy, creating level playing field between independents vs parties and between party in power vs other parties and finally, making ECI a fearless impartial electoral watchdog.

Vjiay Dev also highlighted the values of Indian democracy and all its aspects including purity of electoral roll, need of removing the duplicacy in names from the Electoral Roll, decriminalising the politics etc for making transparency in the system. Some prominent eminent panelists participated in discussion are SY Quraishi (Former Chief Election Commissioner), Dushyant Dave (Sr Advocate, Supreme Court), Prof Niranjan Sahoo (Senior Research Fellow, ORF) and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (Senior Journalist).

The panel discussed the issues related with major threat to Indian democracy i.e. ever increasing regional, linguistic, caste and communal tendencies, the political parties which lack ideology try to exploit these divisive tendencies to win elections and capture power.