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EC Right To Freeze The Sena Symbol

By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2022-10-10 05:41:02

About the Author

Sunil Garodia The India Commentary view

After the Supreme Court rightly refused to intervene in the matter of which faction of the Shiv Sena was 'real' and which faction could use the name, flag and election symbol of the party and left it to the Election Commission (EC) (again, rightly, as the EC is the constitutional body that has the authority to decide such matters) to decide the matter, all eyes were on how the EC would arrive at a decision. Normally, such matter take a lot of time as the respective factions put forward their claims and counter-claims which need to be verified by the EC, since there is a bypoll scheduled for the Andheri (East) assembly constituency on November 3, the Uddhav Thackeray faction had petitioned the EC to take an early call.

But since the EC could not have arrived at a decision so early without going through the claims of the rival factions, it froze the symbol and the name and ordered that till final orders, none of the two factions could use the Shiv Sena name and the 'bow and arrow' symbol of the parent party. The EC took the right decision as per law and convention. It had frozen the symbols of many parties in the past if the need arose to decide the matter at short notice. For instance, the rival factions of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu were not allowed to use the parent party symbol in 2017 in a similar bypoll as the final decision was pending.

The EC is an independent body having the constitutional mandate to conduct free and fair elections and manage all political party related matters. It cannot be rushed into taking a decision. It has to consider all fact presented before it. Hence the criticism of the decision by the Uddhav Thackeray faction is unwarranted. It is necessary for the EC to be fair as its final decision will reinforce public trust in institutions and the electoral process, which, of course, is the backbone of democracy.

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