Palghar bypoll result: After defeat, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray slams Election Commission

Palghar bypoll result: Uddhav Thackeray on Thursday attacked the Election Commission after the Palghar by-election results. The seat has been won by BJP. The Shiv Sena chief said: “Seeing the corruption in Election Commission, I would suggest that even election commissioners should not be appointed, but elected.” He even said that there were some discrepancies in counting and appealed that results should not be announced till those discrepancies are sorted out. He even threatened that if needed, they will go to court. “But, whatever I have said about our democracy, election process and threat to it, was very serious,” he added. Ahead of next year’s general elections, a united opposition got a major boost on Thursday when it delivered a huge blow to the BJP, defeating it in the Kairana Lok Sabha by-election in Uttar Pradesh and Bhandara-Gondiya in Maharashtra while the saffron party managed to retain the Palghar parliamentary seat and win only one out of the 10 Assembly seats in 10 states. In Palghar Lok Sabha seat in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win came in a triangular fight in which the candidate of its sulking ally, the Shiv Sena, cornered a considerable chunk of votes. BJP’s Rajendra Gavit defeated Shiv Sena’s Srinivas Wanga by over 29,500 votes. Out of the four Lok Sabha constituencies that voted on May 24, the Nagaland Lok Sabha constituency returned the candidate of the ruling Nagaland Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP), a BJP ally, who defeated the Naga People’s Front (NPF) candidate. The biggest shock for the BJP came from Kairana — a seat the BJP won in 2014 — where the opposition had put up a common candidate. Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) candidate Tabassum Hasan, supported by the Congress, the SP and the BSP, trounced the BJP’s Mriganka Singh in Kairana in Uttar Pradesh by over 55,000 votes. The BJP along with its allies had swept 73 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 general elections and won an overwhelming 312 seats out of a total 423 in the state assembly elections last year. Source: Financial Express