LS polls Akhilesh Yadav says public insulted in Surat demands restart of election process

    Lucknow, Apr 23 (PTI) A day after the BJP candidate from Gujarat's Surat Lok Sabha seat was elected unopposed, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday said the public has been insulted in the constituency and demanded that the election process should be started afresh.
    In a post on X, Yadav called on the Election Commission (EC) and the Supreme Court to take suo moto cognisance of the matter.
    "The public has been insulted in Surat. They were not even allowed to cast their votes. We have been saying that the BJP will snatch the right to vote. See, that is what has happened," the SP chief said in his post in Hindi.
    "This is also the murder of the Constitution because the people who win through such rigging are not the elected representatives of the public," he said.
    The BJP is "defying" the EC and the poll panel should take action, he added.
    The BJP on Monday won its first seat in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls as its Surat nominee Mukesh Dalal was elected unopposed after the nomination of Congress candidate Nilesh Kumbhani was rejected and others withdrew from the fray.
    Those who withdrew their nominations were four Independents, BSP's Pyarelal Bharti and three candidates from smaller parties.
    Yadav further said that the election process in Surat should be started afresh.
    "Like the Chandigarh mayoral polls, we once again appeal to the Supreme Court and the Election Commission to take suo motu cognisance of what happened in Surat, cancel the election and give the harshest punishment to all conspirators. The election process should be started afresh in Surat," he said.
    In February, the Supreme Court set aside the result of the January 30 Chandigarh mayoral polls and instead declared the AAP-Congress alliance candidate Kuldeep Kumar as the mayor, saying the returning officer put marks on eight ballots cast in Kumar's favour to create a ground for treating them as invalid.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)