Biggest vote theft happened when Cong backed Patel but Nehru became PM: BJP MP

The debate on electoral reforms in the Lok Sabha today morphed into a BJP versus Congress slugfest with speakers from both sides trading barbs on the special intensive revision of voter rolls by the Election Commission.

After Congress leader Manish Tewari opened the debate accusing the EC of bias in the conduct of elections and SIR, BJP's Paschim Champaran MP Sanjay Jaiswal said "vote theft was a Congress tradition."

"The biggest vote theft happened in 1946 when the majority of the Provincial Congress Committees backed Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as Congress chief and India's first PM but Jawaharlal Nehru became one," said Jaiswal on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's accusations of vote theft against the BJP.

Jaiswal defended SIR and said it identified 35 lakh ineligible voters in Bihar who could be Bangladeshis or Rohingya.

"This is not the country of Bangladeshis and Rohingya. We will remove them all," Jaiswal said, adding that Congress lost Bihar because of focus on the non-issue of SIR rather than issues that had piled up in 20 years of NDA rule in the state.

Describing Rahul as a political tourist who was abroad the day Bihar results were counted, Jaiswal said, "Our strategist Amit Shah has never gone abroad. He stays in India and wins elections."

Jaiswal went on to question the EC's move of advancing the entire General Election after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. "Normally elections are cancelled only in the constituency where a candidate dies," the BJP MP from Bihar said.

He questioned the 1987 J&K election that was widely rigged, adding, "The NC and the Congress captured booths and this led to terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir." Jaiswal also blamed Congress for starting the practice of booth capturing from Bihar's Begusarai in 1990s.

"There was a time when murders and violence marked Bihar polls. The Congress did not congratulate the EC for a violence free Bihar poll where not a single repoll had to be done," said the BJP member.