BJP CRIES FOUL

Stung by its washout in the UP council polls, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has accused the ruling party of using official machinery to help its official candidates in contravention of the norms and established procedures.

Bharatiya Janata Party legislature party leader Suresh Khanna accused the UP government of sending a helicopter to send the party symbol for a candidate in the Bareilly-Rampur seat. Speaker Mata Prasad Pandey suggested that the matter be put before the election commission but Khanna maintained that the issue needs to be discussed in the house as well. Khanna demanded that the government should come out with details of who were the officials that had gone to collect the details and what was the amount incurred in rushing papers on a helicopter and if anybody was held accountable.

Parliamentary affairs minister Azam Khan, however, played down the issue and said that the BJP leader’s comments appeared to have been born out of frustration at the party drawing a blank in the council polls.

“The helicopter doesn’t vote in the polls. The problem is that in Bareilly the BJP got a mere 963 votes against 2285 secured by the SP,” he said. At this, Khanna staged a walkout after reciting a poem. State BJP spokesman Vijay Bahadur Pathak later said the SP’s win was a result of ‘use and misuse’ of official machinery. He also said, “This is all the more clear as only recently in the four by-polls, the BJP had won while the SP had fared badly. As far as MLC polls go, in the last council polls too, the ruling party had won but had subsequently lost the assembly polls,” he said. The BJP stood a poor second in 16 of the 28 seats it contested.