ECI’s Credibility
It is disconcerting that the Election Commission of India (ECI), the mainstay of free and fair elections, is suffering from a credibility crisis. On the one hand, the public trust in the ECI is dipping.
Around 79 per cent voting was recorded at the Amarwara State Assembly seat in Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh, where voting for the bypoll was conducted yesterday.
According to officials late Wednesday, there might be a minor change in the final voting percentage after all the polling data is compiled.
The poll percentage in the bypoll is almost 10 per cent less than the voting percentage recorded in the 2023 Assembly polls at Amarwara, which stood at 88.63 per cent.
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There were nine candidates in the fray on the seat for the bypoll. The main contest was between Congress candidate Dheeran Shah Invati and the BJP’s Kamlesh Shah, who had won on a Congress ticket in the 2023 Assembly polls. He later joined the BJP and that necessitated the bypoll.
Shah, a three-time Congress MLA and close confidant of former Congress chief minister Kamal Nath, had quit the grand old party on 29 March, ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. Shah also resigned from his MLA membership from the State Assembly, necessitating the bypoll.
In the 2023 assembly polls at Amarwara, Shah had defeated BJP’s Monika Manmohan Shah Batti by a margin of 25,086 votes. After 1972, the BJP has won from the Amarwara assembly seat only twice — in 1990 and 2008. The Congress has won nine times while tribal outfit Gondwana Gantantra Party (GGP) won the seat in 2003. The GGP fielded Devraven Bhalavi for the bypoll.
Counting will take place on 13 July.
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