EC to vet founders of unrecognised parties during registration

New Delhi: Concerned at the crowding of political space with "inactive" or "defunct" registered unrecognised political parties (RUPPs), Election Commission has now decided to verify the antecedents of founding members of such RUPPs at the registration stage itself."To remove such dubious applicants and to ensure that only genuine applicants get considered for registration, ECI has decided that verification of at least 20 randomly selected individual affidavits of the founding members shall be carried out," EC said in instructions issued on Tuesday.An association seeking registration as a political party under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 must apply within 30 days of its formation, along with its memorandum, constitution and bylaws. At least 100 members of such association should file sworn affidavits, along with certified extracts of electoral rolls showing them to be electors and copies of their electoral photo identity cards. They should also affirm that they are not members of any other registered political party.EC sources on Tuesday said some recent cases of applicants, who had submitted manipulated and/or false affidavits in an attempt to secure registration under Section 29A, had come to its notice. The intensive scrutiny of randomly picked 20 affidavits submitted by the applicant parties - by the state/UT chief electoral officers (CEO) concerned through the district election officers (DEOs) - is aimed at detecting such false affidavits, which will serve as an adverse input while deciding on their registration.As part of its efforts to clean up the political space and weed out non-existent or inactive RUPPs that tend to misuse tax exemptions and serve as money laundering vehicles, EC had in Aug delisted 334 RUPPs, bringing down their total strength to 2,520 from 2,854. A fortnight later, EC identified another 476 RUPPs and directed CEOs to inquire into their activities, including verifying their registered addresses, whether they had been contesting elections in the past six years and whether they are filing their annual contribution reports and audit reports as required by the statute.