With WB ‘vote loot’ exposed, BJP will use ‘improved template’ for UP polls: Akhilesh

Lucknow: Joining ranks with the Trinamool Congress (TMC), Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday said that the BJP is heading a gang of ‘Dus Nambari’ (slang for habitual offenders) people who indulged in blatant loot of votes in West Bengal polls.He said now that the ‘vote loot’ has been exposed, the BJP will develop an “improved template” for the 2027 UP Assembly elections.“Bangal ka jo bhi anubhav hoga inka … usse bhi bada ye UP mein kaam karenge (With the kind of experience they have in West Bengal, they will come up with something more elaborate for the UP polls),” Akhilesh said, addressing a press conference at party headquarters in Lucknow.Akhilesh cited media reports to claim that 27 lakh votes were deleted from the electoral rolls in West Bengal and TMC lost in 100 constituencies where maximum deletions took place.Akhilesh’s attack on the BJP and the Election Commission of India (ECI) comes a day after Mamata Banerjee accused the ECI of ‘colluding’ with the BJP to plunder votes.The SP chief recalled how he accused the ECI of targeted mass deletion of Muslim and Yadav voters from electoral rolls at a public rally and the ECI served him notice to substantiate his claims.“We gave them 18,000 affidavits of people who voted in 2019 but their names were deleted in 2022. They said they haven’t received the affidavits. We put out receipts. The ECI then got district magistrates of Barabanki and other districts to look into the complaints but no action has been taken in any of the complaints,” he said.Akhilesh made a power-point presentation before media persons containing statistics and graphs to explain how the number of votes deleted in Chhibramau, Mariahu and Shahpur Assembly seats was more than the margin by which the party was defeated in the particular elections. He used similar tools to explain how SP won consecutive elections on seats like Kundarki and Rampur and how in byelections the ECI “resorted to deletion of votes and manipulations during counting of votes to alter polling result”.“Nothing explains this better than Kundarki Assembly polls where SP got 37%, 42% and 46% votes against BJP’s 29%, 37% and 30% votes in 2012, 2017 and 2022 polls, respectively. However, in 2024 bypolls SP got 12% votes and BJP bagged 77%. This was BJP’s Dus Nambari model at work,” Akhilesh said. He presented similar statistics to explain how the results got altered against SP in Rampur and Milkipur constituencies during the Assembly bypoll.“Because the SP defeated the BJP in 2024 Lok Sabha polls in UP and even won the Ayodhya (Faizabad) seat, the BJP along with the ECI and central forces will hit us harder in UP polls. But the people of the state will fight the elections along with our party cadres and ensure the victory of PDA and SP in the 2027 Assembly elections,” Akhilesh said.