Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said at a public meeting that the candidature of Narendra Modi should be cancelled by the Election Commission for his \u201chorsetrading\u201d comment.<\/p>\n
PM Modi had on Monday said in West Bengal\u2019s Serampore at an election campaign, that 40 Trinamool Congress lawmakers were in touch with him and would switch over to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after election results were out on May 23.<\/p>\n
During the day, Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Derek O\u2019Brien, in a letter to the Election Commission of India (ECI) wrote that the Prime Minister in his comment, had hinted \u201cthat the members of the AITC will cross over to the Bharatiya Janata Party and [was] using this lie to influence the voters\u201d. He said that the party was \u201cshocked and surprised\u201d to hear the PM say such things at an election campaign.<\/p>\n
Derek O\u2019Brien added that \u201cThis is very unbecoming of the Prime Minister. He is trying to influence the voters to vote for BJP creating a mala fide impression in their minds that many MLAs of AITC are in touch with him and will cross over to his party which will have a bearing on the fate of the present government in West Bengal.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trinamool MP added that the tone of speech is very likely to \u201ccreate an indication of impending horse-trading related to election\u201d.<\/p>\n
He demanded that the ECI \u201ctake cognizance of this unfounded, inappropriate and illegal campaign\u201d and \u201ctake strong action against him as per rules\u201d.<\/p>\n
Derek O\u2019Brien also mentioned in the letter that the BJP leaders \u201chave shown no regard or respect for the Model Code of Conduct or the guidelines issued by the Election Commission.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Election Commission is a constitutional body which is duty bound to ensure a free and fair election,\u201d he wrote, adding that the ECI was thus being \u201crequested to ask Mr. Narendra Modi, the Hon\u2019ble Prime Minister for evidence in support of his statement, failing which his nomination should be cancelled for violation of the Model Code of Conduct by making such provocative and undemocratic statements\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is very unbecoming of the Prime Minister, the Trinamool Congress wrote in the letter to ECI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":279,"featured_media":5189,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_seo_keywords":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}