AFTER VICTORY, MAMATA SAYS WILL MOVE TOP COURT AGAINST POLL BODY

NEW DELHI/KOLKATA : Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Sunday said that the party will move the Supreme Court against the Election Commission of India for “behaving badly” with her party in the course of the politically charged West Bengal assembly election.

Banerjee said three retired officers cannot control democracy. ”We will move the Constitution bench of the Supreme Court against the Election Commission. The EC behaved very badly with us during the entire process. If they behave like this there will be no democracy,” she said. A three-member Trinamool Congress delegation also met chief electoral officer Aariz Aftab in Kolkata on Sunday to ask for a recount of votes in Nandigram, where Banerjee lost a high-profile battle to BJP’S Suvendu Adhikari by a slim margin of 1,956 votes.

NEW DELHI: Election strategist Prashant Kishor, who guided the Trinamool Congress (TMC) to what is likely to be a spectacular victory in the assembly elections in West Bengal, announced on Sunday that he is “quitting this space”, after firing a parting shot at the Election Commission (EC), accusing it of being an “extension of the Bharatiya Janata Party”.

“I am quitting this space,” he told India Today TV channel after trends showed a landslide victory for the TMC, the party whose election strategy he helped craft for the assembly elections.

“I have never seen a more partial Election Commission, it did everything to help BJP .... from allowing use of religion to scheduling poll and bending rules, EC did everything to help the BJP,” he said calling the poll panel an “extension” of the saffron party.

As of 7pm on Sunday, trends released by the national election body showed the TMC winning 213 of the state’s 294 seats, while the BJP grabbed 78. Significantly, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), did not win a single seat in the state it ruled for 34 years, till it was defeated by Banerjee’s party in the 2011 assembly elections.