Patna: Tejashwi Yadav of RJD was elected leader of the Grand Alliance legislative party on Thursday and quickly attacked the NDA, claiming that it won the assembly elections by “deception.”
At a press conference, Yadav mocked Prime Minister Nitish Kumar, whose JD (U) has been relegated to third place in terms of seat counts, and wondered if the latter would “heed his conscience and renounce his attachment. for president”.
Obviously, he was referring to Kumar’s resignation and his break with the Grand Alliance before returning to the fold of the NDA in 2017 after Tejashwi’s name appeared in a money laundering case. Kumar had said then that he would resign after paying attention to his conscience (atma ki awaaz).
Yadav claimed that the people’s mandate was for change, but it was manipulated.
“It was certainly a mandate for change. The NDA won by dhan, bal and chhal (money, muscle strength and deception,” he alleged.
When asked if the Mahagathbandhan would try to gather numbers to form his own government, he said: “We will go to the people who gave the mandate. If they express such a wish, we will act accordingly.”
Citing election data, he claimed that the NDA got only 12,270 more votes than the Mahagathbandhan.
“How can you turn into your victory 15 seats more than us? We believe that if the vote count had been fair, we would have returned with a tally of more than 130 seats,” said Yadav, whose coalition has won 110 seats. 12 less than the magic number of 122. The NDA secured 125 seats.
He said his alliance will write to the Electoral Commission and point out the “discrepancies.”
“In so many electoral districts, postal ballots were counted at the end and not at the beginning of the count, which is the norm. In addition, there were seats where up to 900 postal ballots were invalidated,” argued the RJD leader.
“We suspect that this was done to compensate for the support we had received from a large number of military personnel who were moved by our commitment to a rank, a pension plan. We demand the counting of the postal ballots in all those districts and the process be recorded. on video, “Yadav stated.
The 31-year-old former chief deputy minister alleged that the roving election officials had acted as a “prakoshth” (cell) of the BJP, and answered yes when asked if a legal remedy could be explored if the EC did not satisfactorily address the concerns.
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