With the BJP faring poorly in the zila parishad elections in Haryana, Congress MP Deepender Hooda on Monday said the BJP-JJP coalition does not have the moral right to remain in power in the state as the people have rejected it.
Hooda claimed that 87 per cent of the voters voted for independents and candidates following the ideology of the Congress, while the BJP got only five per cent votes, the INLD and the AAP three per cent each and the BSP two per cent.
"The BJP-JJP, which won 22 councillors out of 411, has no moral right to remain in power even for a single day. Like the Adampur (assembly) by-election, the INLD and the Aam Aadmi Party were wiped out in the panchayat elections as well. It is clear from the results that INLD and Aam Aadmi Party have no future in Haryana politics," he told reporters here.
Hooda said more than 350 independents have won the zila parishad election in Haryana, while the BJP bagged just 22 seats, Aam Aadmi Party 14 and the INLD 13 out of a total of 411 seats.
"In this election the BJP got 4,35,782 votes, vote percentage is 5.1 per cent, JJP got total 1,498 votes which is less than 1 per cent," he said, adding that the BJP could not even find a candidate to contest elections on its symbol on every seat in the entire state.
After trying hard, out of 411 seats, the BJP could get candidates only for 102 seats, Aam Aadmi Party for 114 seats and most of them lost the elections, he claimed.
The Congress did not contest the panchayat polls on the party symbol.
He said there is such a strong sentiment among people against BJP-JJP leaders.
The public not only defeated the wife of Kurukshetra MP Naib Saini, but also did not allow her to enter the main fight and pushed her to the fourth place. Similarly, the daughter-in-law of JJP MLA Ramkaran Kala from Shahabad also had to face defeat.
He said the JJP state president's son could not win from his own village Mamupur and the aunt of a minister the sarpanch election in her village. "It is clear from the results that the BJP-JJP government has lost the trust of the public,” Hooda stated.
"People of the state do not consider INLD and Aam Aadmi Party as important forces in the politics of Haryana. The BJP-JJP got completely wiped out of several districts. Independent candidates won all the seats in districts like Rohtak, Sonipat, Rewari, Mahendragarh, Hisar, Fatehabad. Similarly, in Karnal, Jind, Jhajjar, Panipat, Dadri, Kurukshetra, Yamuna Nagar, Ambala and others, most of the seats were won by independent candidates," Hooda noted.
The BJP suffered a setback in the Haryana Zila Parishad polls winning only 22 of the 100 seats it contested, while the AAP was at the second spot by bagging 15 seats out of the over 100 it contested on the party symbol.
The polls, the results of which were declared on Sunday, also saw the Indian National Lok Dal making some gains.
The Congress and the BJP's ally Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) did not contest the panchayat polls on party symbols.
According to political experts, the poll outcome has come as a wake-up call for the ruling BJP ahead of the 2024 state assembly polls.
The party, however, claimed that more than 150 BJP-backed candidates also won in the elections.
The BJP's drubbing in the zila parishad polls came days after its victory in the Adampur bypoll in Hisar. BJP's Bhavya Bishnoi, the grandson of former Haryana Chief Minister Bhajan Lal, had won the assembly bypoll by a margin of more than 15,000 votes earlier this month.
