Allies Tejashwi, Raut back Rahul

“The BJP has been exposed. Devendra Fadnavis may write articles but the entire world knows how the elections were won,” Raut said, referring to the Chief Minister’s response to the article, published the following day in The Indian Express.

RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, meanwhile, accused the the government of “hijacking” constitutional bodies such as the Election Commission and alleged that the ruling BJP becomes aware of poll schedules even before the dates are announced.

The former deputy chief minister also claimed that the last state assembly polls held in 2020 were not held fairly, and backed the doubts raised by Rahul over the Maharashtra elections.

“One cannot deny the fact that all constitutional bodies have been hijacked ever since the Narendra Modi-led NDA came to power in 2014 at the Centre. It’s quite surprising that BJP’s IT Cell comes to know the dates of elections before the ECI announces them. We are keeping an eye on the developments,” Yadav told reporters here.

“People know what happened in the 2020 assembly polls in the state. We were supposed to form the government. The ECI did three press conferences to justify why counting was stopped in the evening. But why did it resume at night? Those Mahagathbandhan candidates who were declared winners were later announced as losers,” the RJD leader said.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra Congress president Harshwardhan Sapkal on Sunday said Chief Minister Fadnavis’s counter to Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of “matchfixing” in the 2024 Maharashtra elections was “superficial” and “laughable”.

Congress Working Committee member and Maharashtra in-charge Ramesh Chennithala said Rahul’s article “exposes how Maharashtra, once a proud torchbearer of democratic values, has become a cautionary tale of how institutions can be compromised, how power can be snatched instead of earned, and how silence can become complicity. This is no longer about one state or one election. It is about the soul of our democracy”.