Telangana Polls: Chief Electoral Officer Asks Congress, BJP, BRS To Pull Out Ads

Hyderabad (Telangana) [India]: The office of the Chief Electoral Officer (Telangana) has asked major parties in the state to withdraw some of their political advertisements as they were in violation of the Media Certification and Monitoring Committee (MCMC) rules and regulations.

The CEO (Telangana) wrote a letter to the Congress, the BJP and the BRS in the state to withdraw some of their political advertisements.

“All parties agreed to abide by the decision of the certification committee to cancel the approvals given to advertisements mentioned below and gave assurance that these issues will not be repeated again,” the letter read.

The CEO has asked for the withdrawal of 15 advertisements that had violated the MCMC rules.

“Based on the discussion, it is decided to withdraw/withhold permissions given to the following political advertisements of Indian National Congress party/BJP/BRS and the same was already communicated, to all the editors of all electronic media /Social media channels, with a direction to not to telecast the Political Advertisements in channels with immediate effect,” the letter read

Earlier, on November 12, the state-level certification committee ordered all channels and social media platforms to cancel all political advertisements it had approved.

The committee said that these advertisements were being telecast in violation of the MCMC rules.

Telangana is scheduled to go to assembly elections on November 30 and the counting of votes, along with those of four other poll-bound states, has been scheduled for December 3.

The state is set to witness a triangular contest among the BJP, BRS, and Congress.
In the previous Assembly election in 2018, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), previously known as Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), won 88 of the 119 seats, hogging 47.4 per cent of the total vote share.

The Congress came in a distant second with just 19 seats.