Mumbai: Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswami on Saturday said politics had no bearing on the decisions of the Election Commission. In the aftermath of his recommendation for the removal of Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, a tight-lipped CEC avoided queries and refused to comment on his action.

“We do not decide issues on political basis at all,” the CEC replied, when he was asked whether the Commission was getting politicised.

Mr. Gopalaswami was in the city to address the fifth national conference on “Electoral and Political Reforms,” organised by the Association for Democratic Reforms and National Election Watch, non-political groups working for electoral reforms.

Money power

At the conference, the CEC highlighted the issues plaguing electoral democracy. While criminalisation of the polity was a major concern, the practice of pumping unprecedented amounts of money into campaigning was more harmful to the electoral process. “Muscle power is less harmful than money power,” Mr. Gopalaswami said, citing the Commission’s success in containing pre-poll violence in Uttar Pradesh in 2007.

The CEC said the Tirumangalam Assembly by-election in Tamil Nadu in January saw the worst kind of money laundering.

In one instance, where a party opposed distribution of money by another party, people gheraoed the whistle-blowers and demanded the money as their rightful entitlement. Such a response did not “add to the value of democracy,” he said.

Under-represented

Mr. Gopalaswami gave discomfiting statistics on low voting percentages among youth.

The age group 18-25 was under-represented on electoral rolls.

The Commission found that 70 per cent of people in this age group did not get themselves registered on electoral rolls.

Voting percentage

He also pointed to the dismal voting percentage in urban constituencies.

The male-female voting ratio was also adverse. In Uttar Pradesh, it was 898 females per 1,000 males. In some constituencies, it was as low as 603, the CEC said quoting census figures.