Canadian contested to prove election panel’s lax scrutiny

The EC has now asked Roshan Shah (38) who had thrown his hat into the ring in the poll arena from not one but two constituencies to submit his passport, return ticket and other documents.

Shah, while presenting his passport, said that he only wanted to prove any foreigner could fight Indian polls as no proper scrutiny was done by poll officials.

Indeed, Shah, who stood from Ahmedabad East and Kheda as an independent, did not keep poll authorities in the dark about his citizenship and was himself stunned on realising that there was nothing in the nomination form that wants candidates to disclose citizenship.

Shah, a businessman, filled the forms at two places and, much to his astonishment, his candidature was scrutinised and cleared without any hassle. He was also given a ballot number and symbol — a calculator — but nowhere was he asked to state on oath that he was an Indian citizen.

“They ask about criminal records and assets and liabilities but what about the basic rule that only Indian citizens can contest elections. This shows how poorly the candidates are scrutinised by returning officers,” says Shah, adding that he just wanted to prove how poor the process of scrutiny is, and how easy it is for anyone to contest a poll in India.

Much before filing his papers, Shah had sent an RTI query to the PMO requesting information about MPs and MLAs who are foreign nationals or hold passports of other countries but he was told that no such data was available with the government or even with the poll panel. Shah, who had no malafide intentions in fighting elections, later even informed the Election Commission and Gujarat’s chief electoral officer that he was a Canadian citizen and asked why his candidature was not cancelled.

But all he was replied was that the commission had no mechanism in place to check the candidates’ citizenship.

“It was then that I realised how easy it was for a foreign national to fight elections in India and to get elected to Parliament,” says Shah, who then decided to contest the elections not from one, but two seats to further test the scrutiny process. Shah told Khaleej Times that the poll panel must make it mandatory for candidates to reveal their citizenship, adding that the authorities must also know how many of the sitting MLAs and MPs who framed laws for India and its states were passport holders of other countries.

But, of course, he also had another reason to join the ballot-box battle--the lackadaisical attitude of the police in a cheque-bouncing case in Maniangar, the assembly constituency of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

After filing his nomination, Shah even set up a youth organisation, Nav Nirman Yuva Dal, and campaigned for the April 30 polls with a manifesto, according to which, only graduates should be allowed to contest eelctions, people above 65 years should be barred from the polls arena and, finally, parties must field a candidate in an election only twice.

Unlike other candidates, Shah is not awaiting the May 16 results as he simply wanted to draw the attention of the authorities toward the poor scrutiny process and his mission is accomplished with the ECI now woken up to the lacunae in the election laws.— mahesh@khaleejtimes.com

• India