The Election Commission tonight rejected the votes cast by two Congress MLAs who allegedly showed their ballots to BJP chief Amit Shah before casting them in violation of rules, and gave the go ahead for counting of votes in the controversy-ridden Gujarat Rajya Sabha polls.
PTI
NEW DELHI
The poll panel passed the order after viewing the video recording of the voting process, saying two electors -- Bholabhai Gohil and Raghavjibhai Patel -- had "violated the voting procedure and secrecy of ballots." The usually quiet polls for the upper chamber of Parliament turned acrimonious and chaotic after the Congress approached the Election Commission demanding cancellation of the votes of Gohil and Patel for having shown the ballots to people other than the party's authorised representatives.
Three delegations each of the Congress and BJP made a dash for ‘'Nirvachan Sadan'', the EC headquarters, within a span of two hours, with the former demanding that the votes of Gohil and Patel be declared invalid, and the latter insisting that counting be taken up "immediately".
The poll panel, finally, accepted the Congress's contention and asked the returning officer to reject the votes of its two MLAs and proceed with the counting.
That the contest for three Rajya Sabha seats would go down to the wire had become clear the very day when Balwantsinh Rajput, the Congress chief whip in the state Assembly until a few days ago, defected to the BJP and was fielded to take on Ahmed Patel, the high-profile political secretary to Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
