Khushi
Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the Trinamool Congress, announced on Sunday that the party would sue the Election Commission of India for ‘behaving badly’ with her party during the politically charged West Bengal assembly election.
Banerjee said democracarcy cannot be controlled by three retired officers. ”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. Three nominated men, who are retired officers, cannot control democracy,” she said.
On Sunday, a three-member Trinamool Congress delegation met with Chief Electoral Officer Aariz Aftab in Kolkata to request a recount of votes in Nandigram, where Banerjee narrowly lost a high-profile election to BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari by 1,956 votes, and to address other issues.
According to the party, electronic voting machines were allegedly tampered with false or invalid votes, casted in favour of the BJP and postal ballots were incorrectly counted. To protect the integrity of the electoral process, it demanded a recount, but ECI rejected the request.
“I had been saying that BJP won’t even get 70 seats. Even if they manage 75-80 seats, it is because of the ECI. Central forces tortured people in villages and didn’t allow people to vote freely. They posted officers of their choice and resorted to hooliganism,” Banerjee said.
Mamata Banerjee referring to her party’s thumping victory in Bengal and her slim loss in Nandigram, she said, “ECI fought with us just like a BJP spokesperson. Earlier when I said votes were looted in Nandigram no one believed in me. Can it happen that the entire state is giving one verdict and just one constituency is giving another? Servers were stopped for three hours. They announced the winner and later they retracted. Some kind of cheating was going on. We will file a case and fight in the court,”
The Election Commission courted controversy throughout the election, from the prolonged duration of the polls to refusing to concede to the opposition’s demands to combine the last three phases in light of the increase in Covid-19 cases.