PoliticsOpposition
Tejashwi casts Ramlila Maidan as Kurukshetra; Akhilesh takes the vote theft charge to Uttar Pradesh
The RJD and Samajwadi Party leaders used their turns on the INDIA bloc stage to tie the fight over the voter list revision to the next big contest, Uttar Pradesh.
Key points
- Tejashwi Yadav called it a fight between voters and those who cheat.
- He compared the rally to the Mahabharata and Kurukshetra.
- Akhilesh Yadav claimed a loss of about 31,000 votes per seat.
Tejashwi Yadav turned Ramlila Maidan into a battlefield from the epics on Sunday afternoon, telling the INDIA bloc rally that the contest over the voter lists was a fight between voters and vote fraudsters.
“This fight is between the voters and those who commit fraud with votes,” the Rashtriya Janata Dal leader said from the stage, soon after the opposition march reached the ground at about 3 pm. It was his second broadside of the day: on the open bus through central Delhi earlier, he had warned that those who crush democracy never endure.
He was reported to have likened the gathering to the Mahabharata, with the opposition standing at Kurukshetra, and to have invoked Shakuni and his loaded dice to question how elections are now being run. He then looked ahead, urging people to vote the BJP out in Uttar Pradesh when the state goes to the polls.
Akhilesh Yadav, whose Samajwadi Party leads the opposition in Uttar Pradesh, kept the focus on his home state. The SP president repeated the charge of vote theft through the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, raised Pilibhit as an example, and was reported to have put the damage at about 31,000 votes per assembly seat.
The two Yadavs shared the stage with Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, who both demanded the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The Election Commission has denied any political bias in the revision.