Senior Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Somnath Bharti said here on Sunday that he has challenged the Lok Sabha election result for the New Delhi seat in the Delhi High Court.
Bharti lost the recently concluded polls from the constituency to BJP’s Bansuri Swaraj. In a petition he filed in the high court, the AAP leader accused the Election Commission of bias in favour of the rival candidate.
The AAP leader challenged Bansuri Swaraj’s election to the lower house on the grounds of alleged unfair practices.
The petition will be heard on Monday.
Bharti also accused the BJP candidate of overspending and voter manipulation at polling booths and claimed that the BJP rigged the process in its favour.
The AAP leader, who contested the Lok Sabha elections from the New Delhi seat as an INDIA candidate, pointed out at a press conference at the party headquarters that the BJP won all seven seats Lok Sabha seats in Delhi while it was reduced to only 240 seats in the entire country which means the public did not give the BJP an absolute majority of 272.
Pointing out that the upper limit of election expenditure for each candidate in Delhi is fixed at Rs 95 lakh, he said BJP’s Bansuri Swaraj officially spent about Rs 16 lakh more. He alleged that the EC advised her to show Rs 16 lakhs expenditure made from the party account, separate from her own account to save her from disqualification.
He also alleged that on the day of the election, almost every polling agent of the BJP was sitting with a pamphlet in the name of Swaraj across polling booths. He said the pamphlet had the candidate’s photo and name, PM Modi’s photo, and the party symbol, adding that showing such pamphlets within 100 meters of the polling booth is an offence.
“Whichever booth I went to, I found pamphlets everywhere. At the same time, my colleague’s pamphlet in his car remained confiscated for a good number of days. We sent all the videos and photos of this to the Returning Officer, but she kept quiet on it. On May 25, the Returning Officer did not answer my calls,” the AAP leader alleged further.
The AAP leader complained that only BJP agents were present when the voters above 75 years of age cast their votes from home. In such a situation, agents of every party should have been sent along, he added.