The turf battle between the Election Commission and the law ministry has another victim: the Indian International Institute of Democracy and Election Management. This is a dream project of the Commission to plug a vital gap in the gargantuan task of managing an Indian election - training, education and research. But setting it up has proved to be an uphill task with the law ministry putting spokes at every step. A flurry of correspondence between the ministry and the EC speaks of an intense tug-of-war with the ministry first questioning the Commission's jurisdiction to create an international institute and then refusing to process the requisition for funds required to finance it. The ministry took the position that an international institute fell in the domain of the foreign office, not the EC. After the external affairs ministry refused to get involved, law ministry officials wielded the financial stick to beat down the idea.