The Election Commission on Tuesday banned Bharatiya Janata Party’s Gujarat unit president Jitubhai Vaghani from campaigning for 72 hours for violating the poll code by using abusive language. The poll panel, in its notice to Vaghani, said the BJP minister had transgressed “limits of decency”. The ban comes to affect from 4 pm on Wednesday.
Vaghani, the poll panel said, is being penalised for his comments during an election campaign in Amroli, Surat, on April 7. “One incident has occurred,” the commission quoted him as saying. “If another incident occurs then it will not take us long to drive them out of Surat. I warn people of the state from here to know well about these people of unknown parentage.”
The Election Commission said it expects Vaghani not to “repeat such indecent utterances during elections”. Vaghani has been barred from “holding, in any part of the country, public meetings, public processions, public rallies, road shows, interviews, public utterances in the media, etc, in connection with the ongoing election”.
The poll panel told Vaghani that it had found his reply dated April 20 unsatisfactory.
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