Record seizure of cash, jewellery, drugs worth Rs 750 crore in poll-bound Gujarat: CEC
Nov 30, 2022
New Delhi [India], November 30 : Record seizure of cash, jewellery and drugs worth Rs 750 crore has been made by the Election Commission of India, said Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Wednesday.
"Till date, we have seized cash, jewellery, and drugs worth Rs 750 crore in Gujarat," said Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar in an exclusive interview with ANI.
Tomorrow is the first phase of elections in Gujarat in which voting will be held on 89 assembly seats. There are 2.39 crore voters in these 89 seats.
Kumar said, in the 2017 elections in Gujarat, material worth Rs 27 crore was seized. To date, this recovery has been worth Rs 750 crore. 27 crore cash has been seized. Liquor worth Rs 15 crore has been seized. While alcohol is banned in Gujarat. Drugs worth 60 crores have been seized.
Kumar added that the increase in the seizure is due to the strictness of the Election Commission, even today a big seizure is going on in Vadodara. There is a possibility that it will be a seizure of around 450 crore. Kumar said that freebies worth Rs 171 crore have been seized in Gujarat. DRI, Income Tax, ATS Gujarat, and Police, all worked very diligently, he further stated.
Neighbouring states of Gujarat like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Daman-Diu have sealed their borders and made seizures, stated Kumar. Kumar said that our effort is to stop all kinds of temptations and stop the attempts to corrupt the voters.
Kumar further stated that complaints had come from many places that the money is being used to give to the voters in the by-election. This is a bad practice which we are trying to stop completely. This is the result of the strictness of the Election Commission, which has increased manifold in this.
CEC said that when the commission went to review Gujarat and Himachal, it gave clear instructions to all the agencies that we want inducement-free elections.
"We clearly instructed officials that cash, liquor, drugs, and freebies should not be distributed. Everyone did a good job and an amount of 57 crore was seized in Himachal, which is 7 times more than the money seized in the 2017 Himachal elections," CEC further said.
