Irregularities in Cong president’s polls, claims Tharoor team; Mistry denies, says no basis in complaint letter

In the letter to Mistry, Soz had alleged “extremely serious irregularities” in conduct of the election in UP and demanded that votes from the state be deemed invalid. Mistry said there was “no basis” in what is written in the letter and argued that making the letter public was not right.

Tharoor tweeted that it was “unfortunate that a strictly internal letter to the CEA was leaked to the media.”

The Lok Sabha MP from Kerala later said, “Soz was doing his duty in alerting the election authority to any violations that have been reported to us.”

Asked about the response of the party election authority to these allegations, Mistry said, “That they have made it public does not mean we have to make the reply public. We work within the framework of party discipline and it an internal election. But I can assure you a point-by-point reply will be given.”

In his letter, Soz wrote, “The facts are damning and the election process in UP is devoid of credibility and integrity.” The first complaint related to use of “unofficial tags” — the Tharoor camp attached photographs of what they called were unofficial tags used to seal the boxes, and noted that the “lack of official seals on any of the six ballot boxes makes voting in UP void”.

Mistry said, “There were six ballot boxes in UP and they had no problems with seals in four boxes. Today, seals of all six ballot boxes were checked in their (Tharoor team’s) presence. In two boxes….they had said the seal carrying embossed numbers was not there…it is possible… There were so many tags…(but) even if you give all 400 votes in those two boxes to them…he will get 1,072 plus 400…de diye unko, chalo (OK, I give it to them).”

Soz also complained about the “presence of unofficial persons in polling booths”; that three persons, besides the polling agents, sat inside the polling booths and “they were acting like presiding officers…”

“One of them…is a proposer of Mallikarjun Kharge…. We don’t have to tell you what they were doing in the polling booth. They were certainly not there to promote the candidacy of our candidate,” the letter stated.

Mistry said, “Give us a specific example, specific incident…there is no specific incident mentioned in the complaint given to us.”

Soz also wrote, “We suspect voter fraud in this election. There were delegates who were not present in Lucknow area on the day of voting and their votes were cast. There were complaints from people about not being allowed to cast their votes since others had already cast their votes.”

“When our agents complained about voter malpractice, supporters of the other side would come inside the polling booth and create a ruckus and start threatening our polling agents,” Soz’s letter stated. ”We have specific examples of people who were not in Lucknow on polling day and their ballots were recorded as having been cast. We will not disclose those examples to you at this time to protect our sources and to make sure there is no attempt to fix such issues by those who have committed such malpractices.”

The letter also said AICC secretaries in charge of UP belonging to different states were present at the state Congress headquarters in Lucknow in violation of the guidelines issued by the election authority. “We have the sad duty to inform you that Pradeep Narwal, Tauqueer Alam and Dheeraj Gurjar were present in different polling booths in Lucknow and they were not there for any other reason but to influence voters,” it said.

“Other senior leaders (AICC and PCC) were observed in and around polling booths instructing voters to vote a certain way. That AICC secretaries would violate the spirit of your instructions… shows us the impunity with which some of our colleagues operate,” it said.

In a separate letter to Mistry, Tharoor’s team also raised “serious issues” in the conduct of the election in Punjab and Telangana. They alleged “unethical process” was followed in distributing delegate cards in Punjab and presence of PCC chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring inside the polling booth repeatedly and “allowing bogus voting”.

Mistry said no unauthorised person had entered the polling booth.

Asked whether he believes the election was fair, Tharoor used a cricketing analogy: “When you find yourself playing a match on an uneven match and the ball bounces and turns awkwardly, you still have to bat, and I have been batting. We were only concerned that there should be no pitch tampering or ball tampering, and I think for the most part we have no complaints on that score.”

He said, “The result was pretty decisive, so I think it would be unfortunate to blame the conditions. What happened has happened. We had put forward the best account of ourselves that we could and clearly it wasn’t good enough to carry the day.”