“PM Modi-Shah hijacked country”: Rahul Gandhi trains guns at Centre, CEC as protest against ECI continues
New Delhi : Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Tuesday launched a scathing attack against the Centre, while asking the Election Commissioners to meet the opposition leaders and answer their questions regarding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls across the nation.
The opposition MPs marched to the Nirvachan Sadan where they were met with barricades. Speaking to reporters at the Akashvani Bhavan, Rahul Gandhi accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah of “hijacking” the country and undermining the electoral process.
He said, “300 opposition MPs were removed from there, so I came here and sat. We just want to meet Gyanesh Kumar and the other election commissioners. We are all opposition MPs from Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and we just want to talk to them. Don’t know why the Election Commission does not want to talk to us. Crores of people have voted for us. We just want to ask questions, but they don’t want to answer.”
Training guns at the Centre and CEC Gyanesh Kumar, he added, “The democracy is finished. Narendra Modi ji, Amit Shah, Mohan Bhagwat and Gyanesh Kumar have finished the vote. The nation has understood. In a way, Narendra Modi ji and Amit Shah ji have hijacked the country. We are trying to save the constitution… I am asking the police, if you want to remove me from here, just tell me where in the country I can sit.”
Earlier, Gandhi also alleged, “I want to tell the whole country that the police are removing the media personnel from here.”
CPI MP P Sandosh Kumar said that the opposition MPs were prevented from moving forward amid heavy security. He added that parties outside the INDIA bloc, including the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), have also joined the protest.
“We were refrained from moving forward from the very beginning. There was a huge deployment of security personnel, CRPF, RAF, and other forces. We tried our level best to move forward. We will intensify the movement. Detention is not the solution; only resignation is… We are all working unitedly, and there is no separate strategy. Even BJD joined us today beyond the limits of the INDIA alliance,” the CPI leader stated.
Leaders of several INDIA bloc parties have participated in the march and raised their concerns. The protest is part of a broader “Save Democracy” campaign announced by the Opposition, under which its leaders have been holding demonstrations and public programmes against the EC.
The fresh controversy stems from The Indian Express report, which claimed that two of the Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, raised 14 objections during the SIR exercise. The ECI has maintained that the decisions were unanimous.
The opposition leaders have raised questions over the modification in Form 6, after the Supreme Court on Monday said that it had not approved any modified version of Form 6 being used for enrolment of new voters during the SIR exercise.
