Samajwadi Party claimed that party candidate Dimple Yadav would win the Mainpuri bypoll with “three times more votes” than what Mulayam Singh Yadav had garnered.
SP MP Ram Gopal Yadav, after casting his vote at Saifai in Etawah, said Dimple Yadav would win with three times more votes than what Netaji (Mulayam Singh Yadav) used to get.
Ram Gopal Yadav alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party “goons” intimidated the voters and SP workers at various places in Mainpuri.
“In Mainpuri, they were not allowing SP agents at several booths. We have lodged a complaint with the returning officer. Similarly, BJP goons came to a polling station of Mainpuri in an inebriated state and pushed our polling agent out. The police and administration were of no help,” Ram Gopal Yadav alleged.
“Police and administration are manipulating. The Election Commission had directed that security forces’ deployment for election duties should be randomised. But when polling parties arrived, around 2,000 of the staff were stopped and held back as reserves as they had Yadav surname. They forget that not only Yadavs but everyone votes for SP,” Yadav further alleged.
“They did not allow SP workers and supporters to cast votes in Rampur. The beating of people started on Sunday. There is nobody to listen but the public is supreme,” the SP leader said,
SP patron late Mulayam Singh Yadav’s brother Abhay Ram Yadav cast his vote at Abhinav Vidyalaya in Saifai, Etawah and said that there was no competition with any political party. “SP is going to win by a huge margin. There is no competition with any other political party,” he said.
Polling in the Mainpuri Lok Sabha constituency was necessitated following the death of the sitting MP and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh Yadav. The party fielded his daughter-in-law and wife of Akhilesh Yadav, Dimple Yadav. She is pitted against BJP’s former MP Raghuraj Singh Shakya.
Earlier, Azam Khan, who was disqualified from the UP assembly following his conviction in a hate speech case, because of which Rampur assembly seat went to bypolls on Monday, claimed that the people were being arrested and beaten up and told not to step out of their homes to cast their votes.