Accusing Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of being in cahoots with the BJP, Sibal said the CEC‘s “vocation” is to make sure that the BJP somehow wins the election in West Bengal.
Taking a dig at Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for reportedly attributing a Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s quote to Swami Vivekanand, Sibal said the UP CM has no idea about history and the Constitution as he only knows about bulldozers and other such things.
“In elections parties contest not the government. Here the government is fighting the election. 5,000 people from Gujarat are being taken to West Bengal in special trains. Those who wanted to go home, were baton-charged, while a special train was run to take BJP people to West Bengal,” the Independent Rajya Sabha MP alleged at a press conference here.
If the Railways is taking BJP people to West Bengal then it is a straight forward model code of conduct violation, Sibal said.
“It is shocking. It seems that there is a state of emergency in West Bengal outside the Constitution of India. In this emergency, 2,400 platoons of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) have been placed there, which means 2.4 lakh CAPF personnel, which means for every 100 people, one CAPF personnel has been deployed,” he said.
It seems, not the BJP, but the CAPF and the Election Commission, are fighting this election, Sibal said and alleged that this was “gross abuse of state machinery”.”These many CAPF personnel would not be there in Jammu and Kashmir. All this is happening, while violence is going on in Manipur. What is happening to our country?” the senior advocate said.
“Everybody is quiet, no institution is responding. Do we expect the Chief Election Commissioner (Gyanesh Kumar) to respond…they are the ones who are fighting the elections of the BJP,” Sibal alleged.
Referring to certain controversial statements of BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari and Home Minister Amit Shah in West Bengal, Sibal said the kind of speeches they are making is unbelievable.
“There is a woman (Mamata Benerjee) standing against you and you have put the entire strength of the country. This is a very dangerous thing for democracy,” Sibal said.
He further alleged that the entire official strength of the country is being used to destabalise the environment in West Bengal.
“Where does the CEC gets these powers from….483 officers have been transferred. Nobody in this country has unlimited power,” Sibal said.
“It is the CEC’s vocation to make sure that the BJP somehow wins this election,” he alleged.
Sibal also questioned the use of logical discrepancy argument for “disenfranchising” people in West Bengal.
Asked about the outcome of the polls, Sibal said the feedback that is coming is that Banerjee would emerge victorious despite all this.
West Bengal is set to vote in the first phase of the assembly elections on Thursday, amid an increasingly polarised battle in which issues such as corruption and jobs have ceded space to identity, citizenship and the controversy over deleted names from electoral rolls.
The opening round of the two-phase election covers 152 of the state’s 294 seats – including all 54 in north Bengal’s eight districts and several in Murshidabad, Nadia, Birbhum and Hooghly.
The first phase could determine whether the BJP can still rely on north Bengal as its principal gateway to power or whether the TMC has managed to claw back lost ground.
The second phase of Bengal elections would take place on April 29 and the results would be declared on May 4.
