NEW DELHI: The row over the claims of cross voting in the Vice Presidential election deepened on Wednesday with allegations flying thick and fast in the ruling NDA and the INDIA bloc camps blaming each other on the issue.
While Union ministers and senior BJP leaders took aim at the opposition for the fissures in their ranks, senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleged ‘Vote theft’ in the Vice President election, in which NDA candidate CP Radhakrishnan was elected with ‘more than expected’ margin.
Knives were out in the Opposition camp too, with Trinamool Congress (TMC) hinting at the possibility of cross voting by AAP members. Speaking to reporters in Kolkata, TMC MP Abhishek Bajnerjee asserted that all of the 41 members voted for opposition nominee B. Sudershan Reddy.
“Since this was a secret ballot vote, it’s difficult to say whether there was cross-voting or whether Opposition members’ votes were discarded. Even if I accept that there was cross-voting, there are certain parties like AAP, where a woman MP openly supports BJP and speaks against Arvind Kejriwal. There are 2-4 such MPs,” he said.
“Yesterday, I spoke to a few people and learned that they spent Rs 15-20 crores on each person to buy votes. People elected as representatives are selling the people’s trust and emotions. Representatives can be bought, but not the people.
BJP has tried this again, but since this was a secret ballot, everything is speculation. It is a matter of speculation whether the 15 votes which were declared null and void were from the INDIA bloc or not. There could be certain people who said they were aligned with INDIA but were still supporting BJP,” said Banerjee.
Radhakrishnan secured a total of 452 votes, while the INDIA bloc candidate, B Sudershan Reddy, managed to get only 300 votes, though it was expecting to get 320 plus.
Though several senior Congress leaders maintained that the result was a ‘moral victory’ for the Opposition, some spoke in different voices. Responding to the cross voting allegations, senior Congress MP Manish Tewari demanded a probe into such claims.
“If there was cross-voting, then it should be seriously investigated by each of the constituents of the INDIA Alliance. Cross-voting is an extremely serious matter. If at all what is being said or speculated has an iota of truth in it, it deserves a systematic and clinical investigation”, Tewari told the media.