Chief election commissioner Shahabuddin Yaqoob Quraishi is bang on the job. A day after announcing dates for elections in five states (Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur), he is dead serious about dealing with electoral challenges of all kinds, not excluding even the perceived ones.

In a statement (during an interview with PTI) which just fell short of bordering on a threat, Quraishi raised questions of propriety and ethics in Team Anna’s public movement and told its leaders brusquely that they will be watched.

“There is a growing feeling of propriety and ethics, and whether this movement is entering into politics. Then questions will be raised. We feel it is for the leaders of the movement to be very careful that they will not be on the wrong side of the law,” he told the news agency on Sunday.

On a positive note, Quraishi’s ‘no-nonsense-here’ posturing shows remarkable sense of duty in a veteran civil servant who is serious about preempting poll-related problems. On the seamier side, however, mere silence would have been golden and also his saviour.

His reaction to a hypothetical question from media could have been more mature had he chosen to duck it, thereby not touching a topic which was not in his ambit. For example, among the many fears of the CEC is that of the movement entering into politics. Though the CEC did not specify where exactly this feeling of propriety and ethics was growing, but he must be sure of one thing — that Team Anna’s movement was political in essence from day one. Does that bring the entire movement under his control? No.

His assertion that it is for the leaders of the movement to be very careful that they will not be on the wrong side of the law also sounds more of a veiled threat than friendly advice.

But Quraishi’s scholastic personage does not seem to approve of Hazare’s ideas and movement. A few months ago, the CEC had opposed the right to recall or right to reject as advocated by the veteran Gandhian. During Karan Thapar’s the ‘Devil's Advocate’ programme on CNN-IBN (read here), Quraishi had termed Hazare’s idea as not possible in India. However, he could have ducked that query also, saying simply that the CEC does not make laws.