Trinamool Rajya Sabha leader Derek O’Brien on Friday questioned the delay in Parliament taking up notices to remove chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, which were submitted by INDIA bloc MPs on March 12 in both Houses.

O’Brien told reporters: “This is a mockery of parliamentary democracy.... Is this a blatant understanding between the BJP and the EC?”

The identical 10-page notices, accessed by The Telegraph, charged Kumar on the following counts: compromised appointment and tainted inception of office, partisan and discriminatory conduct, deliberate obstruction of investigation into electoral fraud, the “mass disenfranchisement” under the SIR, non-compliance of Supreme Court directions, failure to maintain independence and constitutional fidelity.

The notices were endorsed by 130 Lok Sabha and 63 Rajya Sabha members.

The notices say: “Shri Gyanesh Kumar publicly demanded that the leader of the Opposition submit a signed affidavit within seven days or ‘apologise to the nation’, declaring: ‘There is no third option’.

"When confronted with the fact that Shri Anurag Thakur, a Member of Parliament belonging to the ruling BJP, had made identical allegations of electoral fraud in multiple constituencies including Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh, but was never asked to submit any affidavit nor told to apologise to the nation, Shri Gyanesh Kumar did not respond....

“Shri Gyanesh Kumar sought to justify this discriminatory treatment through a self-invented doctrine of ‘graded response’, a concept that has no basis in the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act, 1951, or the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.”

The procedure for the removal of a chief election commissioner is the same as that for removing a Supreme Court judge, as provided under Article 124(4) of the Constitution and the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968.

The notices said: “That pending conclusion of the inquiry, Shri Gyanesh Kumar be urged to recuse himself from all functions relating to the conduct of elections in states where the SIR is underway or where elections are imminent, to prevent further prejudice to the integrity of the electoral process.”

In the Rajya Sabha on Friday, O’Brien managed to squeeze in a bit about the SIR in Bengal during his Zero Hour intervention on “digital addiction”.

The Trinamool leader proposed solutions and said in the end that it was hard to stay
off one’s screens in Bengal, where people are constantly checking the Election Commission website for their adjudication status.