‘Panchayat polls not a yardstick for Lok Sabha election’

GUWAHATI: Launching a scathing attack on the ruling BJP government and chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal, anti-infiltration group Prabajan Virodhi Manch (PVM) on Sunday said the saffron party’s performance has been below par at the panchayat polls.

“The panchayat poll results show that the ruling party’s performance has been below par. When Congress won in 2013, they got 50.4% of the seats. Though BJP has won this time, it could manage to win only 41.9% of the seats,” PVM convenor and Supreme Court lawyer Upamanyu Hazarika said. He added that Congress had then won 10,806 gram panchayat member seats while BJP has now won 9,094 of those seats.

“Similarly, Congress had won 273 zila parishad seats in 2013 whereas BJP has bagged 221 such seats this time. So, it’s not fair to say that people in rural areas have accepted the BJP? In fact, we can say that rural areas have rejected the BJP,” he claimed.

Hazarika further said, “The Congress party, which had won over 50% of the panchayat seats in 2013, just got seats seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. BJP had bagged seven LS seats that year. Therefore, the panchayat election can never be a yardstick for measuring the government’s performance.”