CHANDIGARH: Punjab Congress president Amrinder Singh Raja Warring on Monday alleged the ruling AAP in Punjab “abused power and manipulated the poll process” to win the recent zila parishad and panchayat samiti election, and claimed that even then it failed to put up an impressive show.He said while the AAP claims to have won 220 of the 347 Zila Parishad seats, it actually won 136 through the “electoral process”, and even that also was “manipulated with abuse of power”.Of the other 84 seats that AAP claims to have won, there was a boycott on 18 seats, 11 were won unopposed, papers were torn in five seats, and in 32 others the papers were arbitrarily rejected, the Congress leader claimed.
He further said that while the AAP won 136 seats, Congress won 62, the SAD 46, the BJP seven and others won 11.Similarly, in panchayat samitis, Warring said against the claim of winning 1,531 seats; it actually won 838 only through the “electoral process”. In the rest of the seats, AAP won by “abuse and intimidation”, he alleged.The Ludhiana MP claimed that there was a boycott in 149 panchayat samiti seats, 212 were won unopposed as the candidates were not allowed to file nomination papers, papers were rejected in 328 seats and at 74 places, results were “forcibly” declared in the ruling party’s favour. Actually, there is not much difference between the AAP and the Congress party’s performance, while the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the BJP were far behind, Warring claimed.He ridiculed the SAD’s claims that it had revived and came second, ahead of the Congress. There cannot be a greater lie than that, the Congress leader claimed.Referring to SAD leader Sukhbir Badal’s claims of “better strike rate than Congress”, he said that when one party contested just 10 seats and won three, should that mean that it is ahead of everyone else? The AAP registered an emphatic victory in the zila parishad panchayat samiti polls in Punjab. The Congress secured the second spot, while the Shiromani Akali Dal got the third, and the BJP was in the fourth position in the rural polls. PTI