Chandigarh, March 15: Finding them guilty of violating the code of conduct, the Election Commission (EC) has issued a warning to city BJP president Sanjay Tandon and six councillors of the party for holding political meetings at community centres.
Sources said besides issuing the warning, the commission had decided to recover the expenditure incurred on holding the functions.
Directions have been issued to the Municipal Corporation to ensure that no leader misuses community centres for political meetings.
The EC issued the order after examining the reply to the show-cause notice issued to them by it earlier.
On Wednesday, the commission had issued a show-cause notice to Tandon and six party councillors — Arun Sood, Ravi Kant Sharma, Shakti Prakash Devshali, Bharat Kumar, Haji Mohammad Khurshid Ali and Satprakash Aggarwal and three sub-divisional engineers for holding political meetings at the municipal corporation-run community centres at Sector 29, 37 and Ram Darbar.
However, the councillors said the meetings were held as per the bylaws of the community centres and no banners, posters and political slogans were used during the functions. Arun Sood, a councillor, said area councillors could hold meetings with residents as per the law and these could not be interpreted as political meetings. In their reply, the councillors claimed that they did not organise any political meetings at the community centres.
An officer of the department concerned said the expenditure would be added to the party’s campaign and recovery would be made as per the law.
The Municipal Corporation has already issued formal orders of suspension to six MC employees for dereliction of duty.
