CPI-M, Cong move ECI against Tripura Minister announcing reward for polling station recording highest vote percentage

The opposition CPI-M and the Congress on Tuesday separately urged the Election Commission to take appropriate action against Tripura Minister and senior BJP leader Ratan Lal Nath, who announced a Rs 2 lakh reward for the polling stations in five Assembly constituencies in the state which would record the highest percentage of votes in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.

In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, Tripura CPI-M Secretary Jitendra Chaudhury called the minister's announcement an “open provocation for false voting”.

State Congress President Asish Kumar Saha in his letter to the CEC urged the poll panel to take immediate and decisive action to rectify these "alarming developments".

“Your swift intervention in addressing these concerns will not only restore confidence in our electoral system, but also reaffirm the resilience of our democratic institutions,” Saha told the CEC.

Nath, who holds the Parliamentary Affairs, Agriculture, and Power portfolios in the state Cabinet, said on Tuesday that during campaigning, he announced that he would give Rs 2 lakh as a reward to the polling station that records the highest percentage of votes in five Assembly constituencies -- Agartala, Mohanpur, Amarpur, Teliamura, and Khowai.

Agartala and Mohanpur Assembly segments fall under the Tripura West Lok Sabha seat, where elections were held in the first phase on April 19, while Amarpur, Teliamura, and Khowai come under the Tripura East (ST) parliamentary constituency, where voting will be held in the second phase on April 26.

“The reward would be given to BJP’s polling booth management, not any individual. Voters in these polling stations can cast his or her vote for any candidate or party of their choice,” Nath told IANS.

Out of the five Assembly segments, the Agartala Assembly constituency has the highest number of polling stations at 57, followed by 56 in Mohanpur, 54 in Teliamura, 53 in Amarpur and, 52 in Khowai.

Claiming that the BJP is the best party in India, Nath claimed that the opposition INDIA bloc would suffer a humiliating defeat in the Lok Sabha polls.

Nath also said that the INDIA bloc failed to engage polling agents in a large number of polling stations in the first phase of polling besides spreading the false propaganda of “booth capturing, rigging, and manipulation done by the BJP".

A former Congress leader, Nath, who's now the second in command in the BJP-led Tripura government after Chief Minister Manik Saha, joined the BJP in 2017, a year before the party came to power in the state for the first time after defeating the CPI-M-led Left parties.