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"I will commit suicide," then prime minister Manmohan Singh had told Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi in 2012 after the poll watchdog chief conveyed his anguish over "loose talk" by ministers on the Election Commission functioning. Singh had also told Quraishi that the Election Commission is not just India's pride; it is the soul of the country's democracy and "if we lose that, we lose everything". The conversation is recalled in Quraishi's forthcoming book "India and I: A Hundred Memories, Not a Memoir'. In his book, Quraishi hails Singh as a leader for whom constitutional propriety was not a talking point but a lived conviction. The former CEC recalls that during an election, in January 2012, in Uttar Pradesh, Salman Khurshid, then Law Minister, promised at a rally that if his party came to power, it would raise the quota for Muslims in jobs from 4.5 per cent to 9 per cent. "The BJP promptly complained of a Model Code violation, which stipulated that no new scheme could b