‘Ab Bengal ki baari’: Bihar BJP MP thanks Opposition for making SIR an election issue, ‘helps us actually’
“We'll raise issue of removing infiltrators from voter lists… but also talk about the failures of the Trinamool govt,” BJP's Sanjay Jaiswal said in Lok Sabha
Bihar BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal on Tuesday thanked Leader of Opposition and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi for raising the issue of alleged “vote chori (theft)” in the Bihar election — and urged him to stick to it in the upcoming West Bengal election too — saying it actually helps the ruling BJP-led NDA.
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“We will urge them to keep raising the issue of SIR in West Bengal too. We will raise the issue of removing infiltrators from voter lists, in which Bangladeshis and Rohingyas having been illegally added earlier. But we will also talk about the failures of the Trinamool Congress government of Mamata Banerjee,” the Paschim Champaran MP said, speaking in the Lok Sabha during a debate on electoral reforms.
“In Bihar, he (Rahul Gandhi) did not raise any issue of the 20 years of NDA rule. He kept saying ‘vote chori, SIR’ and such things. There could have been many things to point out in a 20-year tenure," Jaiswal noted, , “This confused the people of Bihar, as to who was suffering this ‘vote chori’. They could not see it anywhere.”
The SIR is currently on in West Bengal among 12 states and UTs after Bihar.
The West Bengal state assembly election is due by March next year.
Also read | Why Parliament debate focused on Bengal, where assembly election is due soon: PM Modi vs Priyanka, explained
Jaiswal repeated the slogan “Bihar toh hamara ho gaya, ab Bengal ki baari hai” ('We have won Bihar, it's now time for Bengal'), a variation of the one raised on Monday by BJP-led NDA members when PM Narendra Modi entered the Lok Sabha for a discussion on the national song Vande Mataram.
Jaiswal also recalled former PM Atal Bihar Vajpayee's pledge and said: “Andhera chhatega, suraj niklega, aur Bengal mein is baar kamal khilega (Dark clouds will part, the sun will rise through, and Bengal will see the lotus, BJP's symbol, bloom).”
He said Opposition leaders should learn from the BJP and NDA how to dedicatedly fight elections. “You (Rahul) went on a 20-day tourist trip of Bihar,” he said, referring to Rahul Gandhi and RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav's Voter Adhikar Yatra, “but when the election came you went for a trip abroad.”
“The BJP's culture is such that our central leaders also work at the local level. I can make one call and BJP workers from any state will reach mine to help. That is the difference between you and us,” he stressed.
When an Opposition member mentioned the Uttar Pradesh election due in early 2027, Jaiswal quipped: “You are nowhere in UP, don't you worry about that!”
Further on vote-theft allegations, Jaiswal listed the 1947 instance of the Congress choosing Jawaharlal Nehru over Vallabhbhai Patel for the first PM of independent India as “the first and biggest instance of vote chori”. He also listed the 1975-77 Emergency imposed by the then PM Indira Gandhi as another such instance.
Jaiswal then recalled cases of “booth capturing” when elections were held with paper ballots in the mid-1990s. The Congress and Samajwadi Party have demanded a reversion to paper ballots from electronic voting machines, alleging “possibility of tampering”.
As for the focus on Bengal, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had alleged during her speech in the Vande Mataram discussion that PM Modi and the the BJP-led NDA government politicised the national song "only with an eye on the election in West Bengal". It must, however, be mentioned that the song has Bengali origins — it was written by a Bengali, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, as a poem in Sanskritised Bengali in the 1870s.
