The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Wednesday said statements made by certain Congress leaders that the Haryana Assembly election results were unacceptable was “unprecedented” and “unheard in the rich democratic heritage” of the country.
The poll body also met a delegation of Congress leaders who alleged “glaring” discrepancies related to EVMs during counting.
In a scathing letter to Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, the ECI said that the time to meet the delegation had been given presuming that his position that the Haryana results were “unexpected” was the official position, as against that of some leaders who have said that the “results are not acceptable”.
In its letter, the ECI said remarks by party leaders Jairam Ramesh and Pawan Khera on Tuesday move towards “an undemocratic rejection of the will of the people” expressed in accordance with the statutory and regulatory electoral framework.
It also noted the statements of Kharge and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi who have said that the Haryana results were “unexpected” and that the party proposes to analyse the same and approach the ECI with its complaints.
The 12-member Congress delegation, which met the ECI, included, senior Congress leaders K C Venugopal, Pawan Khera, Jairam Ramesh, former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Hooda.
“During the counting of votes for Haryana Assembly elections, a glaring discrepancy was discovered by the INC candidates and their respective polling agents. This discrepancy related to the battery charge/health/capacity of the EVM machines being used during the counting of votes,” the memorandum submitted to the poll body by the Congress party said.
It further said that as per the Congress Candidates, some EVMs used for counting were operating at 99% battery capacity, while other EVMs were operating at 60% to 70% battery capacity. “In fact, in some cases, this discrepancy was discovered in EVMs used in the same polling station. Immediately upon discovery, the INC candidates raised this issue before the concerned Returning Officers, however in majority of the places, there was no response received in this regard”.
Speaking to the media after the meeting with the ECI, Khera said that the delegation intimated the commission regarding complaints from seven Assembly constituencies and has demanded that all machines should be sealed and secured pending investigation. Some of the constituencies were Karnal, Dabwali and Narnaul.
“We will inform them of the rest of the complaints over the next 48 hours and after that all those machines should be secured till the probe is completed”, he said adding that the ECI has assured that they would issue a written response to all the complaints.
Hooda said, “There are doubts on vote counting as Haryana results are surprising, all believed Congress would be forming the next government.”
“When postal ballots were being counted, Congress was winning, but when EVMs were counted the Congress lost,” he said.
Bihar Dalit man assaulted, urinated and spat on for asking his wages
Three members of a family in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district allegedly urinated and spat on Dalit worker Rinku Manjhi, assaulting him and using a casteist slur against him when he asked them for his daily wages.
The victim has filed a complaint accusing Ramesh Patel, Arun Patel and Gaurav Patel of assaulting him on October 4, on the basis of which the police lodged an FIR at Bochaha police station on Tuesday.
In his complaint, Manjhi said that the accused had recently built a poultry farm where he had worked for several days. His wages for two days were withheld. When he went to ask for his pay amid the Durga Puja celebration, the three allegedly beat him up. After spitting on his face, Gaurav Patel also urinated on Manjhi.
According to local villagers, all three assaulted him. They added that after he filed the complaint, Manjhi also received death threats. The police have started conducting raids to nab the culprits. However, no arrest has been made in the case so far.
“We have received one such case where victim Rinku Manjhi who is a daily wage labourer used to work at the farm of Ramesh Patel. Bochaha police station got the information on October 8, however the incident took place on October 4. Police have registered the matter with case number 291/24, date 08-10-24. Investigation is being carried out in the case and prima facie reveals that casteist slur was made by Ramesh Patel and he also beat him up. Further investigation is going on,” Vidya Sagar, the Superintendent of Police for rural Muzaffarpur, said on Wednesday.
However, Bochaha Station House Officer Rakesh Kumar Yadav told The Hindu that there is no evidence so far of anyone spitting or urinating on the victim.
The FIR has been filed under Sections 324 (wrongful loss or damage), 307 (theft after preparing for causing death, hurt, restraint), 504 (intentional insult to provoke breach of peace), and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, as well as several sections of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
Allies ask Congress to introspect after Haryana, J&K results
Urging the Congress to “introspect” over the Assembly election results declared on Tuesday, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) parties said that Congress’s “over confidence” and “arrogance” led to their defeat in Haryana and modest performance in Jammu and Kashmir.
The strongest criticism came from Shiv Sena (UBT), which indicates trouble ahead during the negotiations within the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) in Maharashtra. Speaking in Mumbai to reporters, senior Shiv Sena (UBT) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut said that the poll outcome could have been different if there was an overarching alliance in place in Haryana.
“Wherever the Congress is weak it takes help from regional parties, but where it thinks it is strong, the Congress assigns no importance to regional parties,” Raut said.
He drew a parallel with Jammu and Kashmir, where the National Conference accommodated allies, including the Congress. He also pressed for the MVA to declare a Chief Ministerial candidate, saying that having Omar Abdullah as the face in J&K helped the alliance. “In a state like Maharashtra, people want a leader. People cannot digest the policy that you first contest polls and declare the CM’s face later”.
The Congress and the Sharad Pawar-led NCP (SP) are insisting that the CM will be finalised based on the strength of each of the MVA constituents.
“Had Haryana polls contested by INDI alliance and seats allocated to Samajwadi Party, Aam Aadmi Party, NCP (SP), and Shiv Sena (UBT), such scenario would have helped the alliance, but Congress thought the battle would be one-sided and it will win on its own,” he said. At the same time, Raut said that Tuesday’s results will have no bearing on Maharashtra Assembly polls.
Despite several rounds of talks with the Aam Aadmi Party, initiated on the suggestion of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, the alliance was stalled by former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda-led faction in the State.
Former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal said the single biggest lesson from the results is that no party should be “overconfident”.
Trinamool Congress, which did not have an electoral understanding with the Congress in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, and positions itself at a distance from the grand old party, even within the INDIA bloc, took the opportunity to underline the significance of regional parties.
Without naming the Congress, TMC Rajya Sabha MP Saket Gokhale, in a post on X said, that the attitude to not accommodate regional parties when they believe they are winning while expecting the regional parties to accommodate them in States where they are weak needs to change. “Arrogance, entitlement, and looking down on regional parties is a recipe for disaster,” he said.
CPI(M), in alliance with the Congress in both Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir, was also mildly critical of the party’s electoral strategy. In a statement, CPI(M) polit bureau said that the results provide “valuable lessons for secular forces”.
BJP’s victory in Haryana, CPI(M) said, is marked by micro-caste mobilisation and insidious communal propaganda. “The Congress will have to introspect as to the other factors responsible for this verdict,” the polit bureau noted.
Communist Party of Indian (CPI) General Secretary D. Raja also spoke on similar lines, exhorting the Congress to introspect the reasons for their defeat and be more accommodative of allies in the future.
Delhi CM Atishi’s office says her belongings were removed from official residence
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Wednesday alleged that Chief Minister Atishi’s belongings were removed from the “CM’s House (official residence)“, 6, Flag Staff Road in Civil Lines and the bungalow was not being officially handed over to Atishi.
Earlier this week, the AAP had released videos of Atishi’s belongings being moved in a vehicle to the premises of the bungalow 6, Flag Staff Road and also released a video of her meeting the staff at an office in the premises.
Meanwhile, sources in the Raj Niwas stated that 6, Flag Staff Road is not an official “CM’s House”. “The owner of the house, like all other Chief Ministers’ residences, is the Public Works Department. PWD takes possession of the house when it is vacant, prepares its inventory and then duly allocates it,” the source added.
“AAP should not worry, this bungalow will be immediately allotted to the Chief Minister after preparing the proper inventory,” the source added.
Atishi is currently staying at the bungalow 17, A.B. Mathura Road, which was allotted to her when she became a Cabinet Minister last year. Former Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit did not stay at 6, Flag Staff Road and lived in a different bungalow allotted by the government.
Meanwhile, welcoming the move to “seal” the house, Delhi BJP President Virendra Sachdeva said that the sealing of the bungalow by the PWD is in line with public aspirations and the department should conduct a video graphic survey of this building and present the report to the people of Delhi.
Sachdeva alleged that the hurried efforts by the AAP to allow Atishi to occupy the “sheeshmahal bungalow” without adhering to government allotment rules clearly indicates that there is something in house that former CM Arvind Kejriwal wants to hide from the law.
Hitting back at the BJP, senior AAP leader Saurabh Bharadwaj alleged that the L-G is planting news in the media that Atishi’s belongings were thrown out of the “CM House” because she did not give the keys of the CM House to the PWD.
“After throwing out Atishi ji’s belongings, the inventory inside the house will be taken and after that the house will be allotted to her. I would like to ask LG Sahib with all due respect that when he shifted to Raj Niwas, did the old LG hand over the keys of Raj Niwas to PWD and was the inventory of Raj Niwas taken before the new LG shifted?” he said in a post on X.
Earlier in the day, AAP senior leader Sanjay Singh alleged that officers were not allotting the “CM’s House” to Atishi and the BJP is aiming to illegally occupy it.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for decoding protein design and structures
The 2024 Nobel Prize for chemistry was shared by David Baker “for computational protein design” along with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday (October 9, 2024).
Last year the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was jointly awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honoured research that connected the sequence of amino acids that make up a protein and the protein’s structure.
Baker led a team that in 2003 designed a new protein using bespoke software methods. They and others have since refined these methods to be able to point the way to ‘designer’ proteins intended for specific applications.
Johan Åqvist, a former chair of the chemistry Nobel Committee, called the variety of proteins developed by Baker et al. to be “absolutely mind-blowing” and that “it seems that you can almost construct any type of protein with this technology”.
Hassabis and Jumper received the other half of the prize for their hand in developing an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold 2 that could predict the structures of millions of proteins. Human scientists had done that for only around 1.7 lakh proteins until then, although the structures and patterns therein were used to train AlphaFold.
“Four years ago in 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper managed to crack the code. With skillful use of artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,” Linke said.
The Nobel Prize for Hassabis and Jumper comes relatively quickly after the corresponding work, around four to six years. There is usually a gap of a few decades between the work and the prize because the former doesn’t immediately prove to be of “greatest benefit to humankind” -- a criterion for winning.
For example, John Goodenough shared the 2019 chemistry prize for his work on lithium-ion batteries in the late 1970s. John Nash, Jr. won part of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994 for work he had done in the 1950s.
The chemistry prize this year also continues a relatively new tradition in this category of the prize going to non-chemists -- although 1981 chemistry laureate Roald Hoffmann has interpreted this to be a mark of chemistry’s “far and influential reach”, especially in biochemistry and molecular biology.
Baker works at the University of Washington in Seattle and Hassabis and Jumper work at Google DeepMind in London.
The Prize for Physiology or Medicine, won by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation, kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. The Physics Nobel, announced on October 8, was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on machine learning with artificial neural networks. The winners of the Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences Prize will be declared on October 10, October 11, and October 14 respectively.
The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be awarded on December 10.
The Nobel Prize was created by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who in his will dictated that his estate should be used to fund “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.
In Brief:
Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday ahead of his likely swearing-in as the head of the BJP government in the state after the ruling party pulled off a hat-trick of wins in Haryana to retain power. The BJP had indicated during the elections that Saini, who replaced Manohar Lal Khattar in March and hails from the Other Backward Classes, will be its choice for the top post if it wins. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Saini credited PM Modi’s policies for the party’s success. He said psephologists might have declared the Congress as the favourite to win the polls but he always insisted that people will put their trust in the BJP due to its government’s policies.
Evening wrap will be back tomorrow
Published - October 09, 2024 09:38 pm IST
