A letter from Shashi Tharoor’s marketing campaign group on Tuesday alleging irregularities and malpractices within the conduct of Congress President’s election in Uttar Pradesh surfaced in public on the day of counting of votes on Wednesday.
Electoral authority chief Madhusudan Mistry denied all allegations as baseless and stated he would give a “point-by-point” reply to Tharoor’s chief election agent Salman Anees Soz.
In a letter to Mistry, Soz had alleged “extremely serious irregularities” within the conduct of elections in UP and demanded that the state’s votes be handled as invalid. Mistry stated that what was written within the letter had “no basis” and argued that it was not proper to make the letter public.
Tharoor tweeted that it was “unfortunate that a stern internal letter to the CEA was leaked to the media.”
The Lok Sabha MP from Kerala later stated, “Soz was doing his duty in alerting the election authority about any violations, which have been reported to us.”
When requested concerning the occasion’s election authority’s response to those allegations, Mistry stated, “They have made it public doesn’t mean that we have to make the answer public. We work within the framework of party discipline and it is a There is an internal choice. But I can assure you that a point-by-point answer will be given.”
“The facts are bad and the election process in UP is devoid of credibility and integrity,” Soz wrote in his letter. The first criticism associated to using “unofficial tags” – the Tharoor camp hooked up images which they stated had been unofficial tags used to seal the containers, and famous that “out of the six ballot boxes Lack of official seals on anyone vote in UP. Zero”.
Mistry stated, “There were six ballot boxes in UP and they had no problem with the four boxes being sealed. Today in his presence (Tharoor’s team) the seals of all six ballot boxes were checked. In two boxes….he had said that There is no seal with embossed number… it is possible… there were so many tags…(but) even if you give him all 400 votes in those two boxes…he will get 1072 and 400…de di unko, chalo (Okay, I I give them).”
Soz additionally complained concerning the “presence of informal persons in polling stations”; that other than the polling brokers, three individuals had been sitting contained in the polling stations and “they were acting as presiding officers…”
“One of them… is the proponent of Mallikarjun Kharge…. We don’t need to tell you what they were doing at the polling station. They were certainly not meant to promote the candidature of our candidate,” the letter stated.
“Give us a specific example, a specific incident… no specific incident is mentioned in the complaint given to us,” Mistry stated.
Soz additionally wrote, “We suspect voter fraud on this election. There had been representatives who weren’t current within the Lucknow space on the day of polling and their vote was forged. Complaints had been being produced from folks about not casting their votes as a result of Others had already forged their votes.
“When our agents complained about voter malpractice, supporters of the other party came inside the polling station and created a ruckus and started threatening our polling agents,” Soz’s letter stated. “We have particular examples of people that weren’t in Lucknow on the day of polling and their ballots had been recorded as being forged. We is not going to disclose these situations right now to guard our sources and to make sure that no try is made to appropriate such points by such malpractices. ,
The letter additionally stated that the AICC secretaries in command of UP belonging to completely different states had been current on the state Congress headquarters in Lucknow in violation of the rules issued by the election authority. It stated, “We have a sad duty to inform you that Pradeep Narwal, Tauqeer Alam and Dheeraj Gurjar were present at various polling stations in Lucknow and they were not for any other reason but to influence the voters.”
“Other senior leaders (AICC and PCC) had been seen instructing voters to vote in a sure method in and across the polling stations. That the AICC Secretary will violate the spirit of your directions…
In a separate letter to Mistry, Tharoor’s group additionally raised “serious issues” within the conduct of elections in Punjab and Telangana. He alleged that “immoral procedure” was adopted in Punjab in distribution of delegate playing cards and repeated presence of PCC chief Amarinder Singh Raja Waring inside polling cubicles and “fake voting”.
Mistry stated that no unauthorized individual had entered the polling sales space.
Asked whether or not he believed the election was honest, Tharoor used a cricket analogy: “When you end up enjoying a match on an uneven floor and the ball bounces and turns awkwardly, Even then it’s a must to bat, and I’m batting. We had been solely involved that there was no pitch tampering or ball tampering, and I feel for essentially the most half now we have no complaints on that rating. ,
He stated, “The result was quite conclusive, so I think it would be unfortunate to blame the circumstances. Whatever happened, it happened. We had put our best account of ourselves and clearly it was not enough to move the day forward,” he stated. .
With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
