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‘Namo Again’ on restaurant receipts in Congress bastion
A visitor to the restaurant shared the receipt with the media after spotting ‘Namo Again 2019’ mentioned on the bottom of the receipt given to him by Shree Ganesh Sweets and Restaurants at Prabhu Town crossing in Rae Bareli on April 14. He said he went there to purchase some sweets when he noticed it.
After the ‘Namo Foods’ controversy in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddha Nagar (Noida) during the first phase of the parliamentary elections on April 11, a similar matter has come to the fore in Rae Bareli district where Namo Again-2019 was mentioned on receipts that a restaurant gave to its customers.
Polling in Rae Bareli, the Lok Sabha constituency of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, is scheduled in the fifth phase on May 6.
A visitor to the restaurant shared the receipt with the media after spotting ‘Namo Again 2019’ mentioned on the bottom of the receipt given to him by Shree Ganesh Sweets and Restaurants at Prabhu Town crossing in Rae Bareli on April 14. He said he went there to purchase some sweets when he noticed it.
When contacted, manager of the restaurant Deepu Chowdhary said they had mentioned ‘Namo Again’ due to their faith in Lord Shiva but removed it after some customers complained that it was a model code of conduct violation. He said ‘Namo Again’ had been removed and ‘I Love India’ had been mentioned on the receipt instead.
When asked, chief electoral officer, UP, L Venkateshwarlu said, “In such cases, a complaint can be made to local DMs who are empowered to investigate what kind of offence it constitutes. If it’s a case of model code violation and/or something else, various aspects are looked into.”
Earlier, on April 11, voters and residents at a polling booth in Uttar Pradesh’s Noida had complained that its staff ordered lunch packs from a restaurant called NaMo Foods, violating the model code of conduct. The food packets were allegedly distributed to the police personnel deployed on the election duty on the first phase of polling.
The polling station in Sector 15A Noida, which comes under the Gautam Buddha Nagar parliamentary constituency, is near the residence of BJP candidate and Union minister Mahesh Sharma, who is pitted against Satveer Nagar of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Congress’s Arvind Singh.
The Gautam Buddha Nagar district administration stated misinformation was being spread that some policemen had been given food by a political party. Gautam Budh Nagar’s senior superintendent of police Vaibhav Krishna said the allegations were baseless and some food packets were procured from Namo Food Shop, and not from any political party.
