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Patna, November 17 (IANS) After the crushing defeat in Bihar assembly elections, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) called an important review meeting on Monday.
RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, former Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, all the winning MLAs and losing candidates attended the meeting.
According to sources, the party is still not fully accepting the NDA’s landslide victory and is exploring the possibility of challenging the results through legal channels.
Talking to journalists after the meeting, former Parbatta MLA Sanjeev Kumar expressed strong dissatisfaction.
He claimed, “The result is certainly surprising. It is impossible without some form of manipulation.”
He rejected suggestions that the NDA’s victory was entirely due to development work, saying, “People are saying that this is the victory of Nitish Kumar’s development. He was doing development for the last many years, but did not get such results. I also did development work in my area, yet I lost.”
Sanjeev repeated the allegations of irregularities in EVMs.
He said, “Even before the elections, a list of 65 seats was prepared. My seat was in that list. The list was with an officer and I myself have seen it. These 65 seats were targeted.”
He also raised questions on the victory margin of RJD candidates.
Many of the 25 winning RJD MLAs were expected to win by a margin of more than 50,000 votes, but they won by only 10,000-11,000 votes.
He said RJD’s total vote share – around 1.8 crore votes – clearly shows that the party enjoys widespread support irrespective of the last seats.
Maner MLA Bhai Virendra made similar allegations.
“There has been fraud in EVMs and we should fight against it,” he said.
He claimed that RJD candidates were leading during the counting of postal ballots, but the situation reversed as soon as counting from EVMs started.
“We won because of the ballot paper; we lost because of the EVMs. We are analyzing the situation and legal options are open to us. Such a result is surprising,” he said.
RJD candidate from Lalganj Shivani Shukla also expressed concern over the results of her constituency.
Giving the example of an independent candidate allegedly not getting even a single vote, he described it as extremely worrying and said that questions would definitely be raised.
The RJD leadership is expected to meet again in the coming days to finalize its next step, including the possibility of approaching the Election Commission or the courts.
–IANS
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