Refusing to believe the results of Haryana assembly, the Congress on Tuesday said there were “irregularities” in vote counting, and the election outcome was not “unacceptable” to it.
The Election Commission of India (ECI), however, refute the Congress’ charge, terming it “ill-founded” allegations.
Belying the exit polls, which had predicted comfortable win for the Congress in Haryana, the BJP scored a landslide victory in the state.
Pawan Khera of the Congress announced the election results were unexpected, and are unacceptable to the party.
He also said the party kept receiving complaints about irregularities in the counting of votes.
“The results are unexpected and we would even say that they are unacceptable. The kind of complaints that are continuously coming in. There are continuous complaints about our candidate from three districts, Hisar, Mahendragarh and Panipat. Complaints are continuously coming about how some batteries of machines that were 99% showed us losing and in the machines which were not touched, whose batteries were 60-70% shows our candidate winning,” he was quoted as saying.
The Congress leader also stressed that his party can’t accept the “defeat of democracy”.
“If it is said in one line, this is the victory of the system and the defeat of democracy. We cannot accept this…We are collecting complaints. Our candidates have given complaints to the returning officers there and are still giving them. In the coming days, we will soon go to the Election Commission with all these complaints and register our complaint there. This kind of result was not visible anywhere on the ground. No one can believe that such an unexpected result will come in Haryana. We are all surprised,” he added.
A comfortable victory was expected for the Congress, according to poll predications carried out by various firms.
“The results in Haryana are unexpected, completely surprising and counter-intuitive. It goes against ground reality. It goes against what the people of Haryana had made their minds up for, which was for change and transformation. I think under these circumstances, it is not possible for us to accept the results that have been announced today,” Jairam Ramesh, another leader of the Congress told press.