Congress, allies get some cheer amid exit poll blues

Resmi Sivaram

New developments on Wednesday brought cheer to opposition parties which were demoralised by Sunday’s exit poll predictions that gave a massive victory to the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha election 2019.

With counting of votes set for Thursday, leading entrepreneur Anil Ambani on Wednesday dramatically withdrew Rs50 billion cases of defamation he had filed against the Congress and its newspaper National Herald. The suits were filed in an Ahmedabad court after the main opposition party raised allegations against the Ambani group in relation to the Rafale fighter jet deal.

Lawyers for the Congress and Herald said they had been told by Ambani’s advocates that the suits will be withdrawn as soon as the court reopens.

Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Defence, Reliance Infrastructure and Reliance Aerostructure filed civil defamation suits against Congress leaders including Sunil Jakhar, Randeep Singh Surjewala, Oommen Chandy, Ashok Chavan, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Sanjay Nirupam and Shaktisinh Gohil, and journalists and news organisations like the National Herald.

The petitions alleged that “libelous and derogatory statements” were made against the Reliance Group and its chairman Anil Ambani on the Rafale fighter jet deal.

The petitions asked the defendants to “cease and desist” from levelling allegations against the company in connection with the Rafale deal.

Another major development on Wednesday was that seat-wise predictions published by the India Today-Axis My India exit polls were removed from several web pages, including the Axis’ official website, after people over social media on pointed out errors in some of its predictions.

The exit poll said it is “Based purely on the popularity of the political party during exit polls and not based on the individual candidate.” People were not asked which party’s candidate they voted for.

The survey also named all five Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttrakhand wrongly. It showed Sadulshahar, Ganganagar, Karanpur, Suratgarh and Raisingh Nagar as parliamentary constituencies, but these are Assembly constituencies.

The India Today put out a disclaimer: “Seat by seat analysis is based purely on the popularity of the political party during exit polls and not based on the individual candidate. Hence, Axis My India cannot be held responsible for any variation of the winning or losing of the individual candidate stated in the seat-wise results.” Former President Pranab Mukherjee’s U-turn on the poll panel was a significant development too. The Bharat Ratna awardee, who had warmed to the RSS and the BJP of late, had on Sunday hailed the Election Commission for conducting a “perfect” election. But on Tuesday he issued a statement which expressed concern about alleged tampering of the people’s mandate.

He said: “If we want to strengthen institutions, we have to keep in mind that institutions are serving well in this country, and if democracy has succeeded, it’s largely due to the perfect conduct of elections by all Election Commissioners, starting from Sukumar Sen to the present Election Commissioners. All are appointed by the executive and they are doing their job well. You can’t criticise them. It was perfect conduct of the elections.” The development brought much cheer to the opposition. Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday issued a statement calling on Congress ranks to ignore the “faulty” exit polls.

Counting of votes in the national general election will be business as usual on Thursday, as the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Wednesday rejected a demand raised by opposition parties that the VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail) slips with the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) should be counted before votes.

The verification of EVM votes with VVPAT slips from five random polling booths in each assembly segment will be done after votes are counted, the ECI decided in a sitting.

On visuals showing the movement of EVMs in state like Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, the poll panel said they are unused machines. Rules specify that the movement of used and unused EVMs should be simultaneous.

Representatives of 22 opposition parties had met the ECI and demanded that the VVPAT verification process should take place before the counting of votes begin. They said 100 per cent votes from the assembly segment should be tallied in case any discrepancy is found.

All three members of the ECI sat on Wednesday and reviewed the demand.