Over one thousand political parties have been delisted by the Election Commission of India over the last two years.
According to Om Prakash Rawat, Chief Election Commissioner, the political parties have been delisted for being inactive over a prolonged period, not taking part in the election process or because of mismatch of details such as address and so on.
“After the Supreme Court held that we cannot deregister political parties, we explored other options. We found that we could delist parties, and over the last two years, 1,000 plus political parties have been delisted,” Rawat told reporters during an interactive session organised by the Merchants Chamber of Commerce.
“We sent notices to these political parties and once these notices returned, or we found that there was an address mismatch, or that a political party has remained inactive and not taken part in an election, we take steps to delist them,” he added.
Fake news
The Election Commission of India, Rawat said, is aware of the problem of fake news and data breach through social media accounts.
Accordingly, the Election Commisison has set up a social media team to monitor such activities, prevent data breach of electorates and take corrective action. In fact, the Election Commission may consider a model code of conduct for social media. He, however, did not elaborate.
The recent data breach by Cambridge Analytica - where Facebook users’ private data was allegedly used to manipulate voting pattern - saw the data of 5,00,000 users being compromised in India.
“The number of users, whose data was breached in India, is small compared to the total electorates. But the Election Commission is aware of the threat that this sort of breaches pose to the election process,” he said.