The Bharatiya Janata Party distributed pages from Justice J C Shah's report to mediapersons in its bid to prove that Navin Chawla, who was appointed election commissioner in 2004, had close contacts with the Congress party and that his role during the emergency had also come under scrutiny during the hearings of the Shah commission hearings.
Addressing newsmen at the party headquarters, Arun Jaitley, general secretary of the BJP, alleged that either the Cabinet committee on appointments was not told about the benefits from the trusts run by Chawla and his wife Rupika, or it chose to overlook the information and went ahead with his appointment as the election commissioner of India.
"Chawla has himself admitted that the trusts had received donations from the MPLAD funds, but that was before his appointment. We are not going into the details of what all his trusts did. But a person who has close association with a particular political party should not have been appointed as election commissioner as it undermines his independence to take decisions in an objective manner," Jaitley said.
He told newsmen that the process for writing to the chief election commissioner for recommending removal of Chawla is already in the process. "We are going to file the petition under Article 324 subsection 5, which gives powers to the chief election commissioner to recommend to the President of India to remove an election commissioner," he said.
Jaitley alleged that Chawla as Indian Administrative Service officer was virtully ruling the roost in Delhi during the emergency and his orders alone were obeyed by the junior officers whether they were posted in Tihar jail or somewhere else.
"It was he who ordered detention or release of any individual under Maintainance of Internal Security Act," he pointed out.
