Cong candidate accuses Patole of working for RSS

MUMBAI: As the state Congress party reviewed the reasons for its poor performance in the Assembly polls in an introspection meeting at its Dadar office, the top leadership faced serious accusations from its candidate from Nagpur Central constituency, Bunty Shelke, who accused state Congress chief Nana Patole of secretly working for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s ideologue.

Shelke accused Patole of conspiring against him and blamed him for his defeat. Shelke lost the poll in a close contest with BJP candidate Pravin Datke, by 11,632 votes.

“He is a RSS agent and destroyed the party. It is because of him that Congress slipped to fifth position in the state. He had directed the local leaders not to support me. He even did not recommend my name despite the fact that I lost the seat only by 4,000 votes in 2019,” he said.

Shelke also said that Patole’s entire focus was on how to become the chief minister if the MVA comes to power.

Shelke was elected as a corporator in 2017 from the constituency that houses the RSS headquarters and the residences of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and union minister Nitin Gadkari.

While candidate Arif Naseem Khan, seeking to verify the burnt memory in the microcontroller EVMs, following the verdict of the Supreme Court in April, said he paid around ₹10 lakh towards its expenses. “The burnt memory semicontroller in 5% of the EVMs will be checked and verified by a team of engineers from the manufacturers for which I have paid the charges,” Khan said.

Meanwhile, state party chief Patole, after meeting the newly-elected MLAs as well as the defeated candidates on Wednesday, accused the election commission of robbing the people of their votes by pointing at the last-hour rise in voting percentage.

Referring to the data released by the election commission, Patole said that the voter turnout at 5pm on polling day was reported as 58.22%. By 11:30pm, the same night, it increased to 65.02%, and by the next day, November 21, it rose to 66.05%. This shows a clear increase of 7.83 percentage points, or 7.6 million. “The rise is doubtful, and the poll body should release video footage from the polling centres where such a rise was recorded,” he demanded.

As many as 85 candidates of Congress were defeated in the assembly elections, with 17 candidates losing by more than 50,000 votes.