Mumbai bookies on Tuesday opened their rate cards on the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections; they predict while no party will get a clear majority, the Congress will form government in alliance with the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal. In all, the bookies expect to do a business of anything between `22,000 to `25,000 crore till the elections.
A party requires at least 202 of the 403 seats in the UP Assembly to for majority and to form government. “No party will get a clear majority. The SP won’t cross 130 to 135 seats. The Congress-SP-RLD alliance will form the next government,” said a city-based bookie. He added that SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav or Akhilesh Yadav are the top contenders for the chief minister’s post.
According to the bookie, the corruption issue will go against Mayawati’s BSP and the Congress will gain the most from this. “The anti-incumbency factor will work against the BSP. The Congress has got good response in Rahul Gandhi’s rallies and will do well in the elections. The BJP will win around the same number of seats as in the 2007 elections,” he said.
The bookie also predicted that there will be 55 to 60 per cent voting in the state and that politicians are betting a lot of money on the UP elections. “We have got insider information from some politicians who are major punters on the elections this time. We’ll see around `22 to 25,000 crore in play,” he said.
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Ec refutes reports on poll official transfer
AGE CORRESPONDENT
New Delhi, Feb. 7
The EC on Tuesday strongly refuted reports that Pawan Kumar Sain, a district electoral officer (DEO) in Uttar Pradesh, was transferred to Goa, since rescinded, for having stopped the convoy of Mr Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
The EC had transferred him on Monday as the district collector of South Goa, then put it on hold till the completion of polls in Amethi and finally cancelled the order and replaced him with Daulat A. Havaldar.
Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi said here that the decision to transfer Mr Sain had nothing to do with the incident involving Mr Vadra. He said, “Today’s incident is unrelated to the observer’s transfer. It has nothing to do with it.”
The EC in a statement said that it had come across “unwarranted references” concerning its decision to transfer Mr Sain and clarified that “it has been baselessly linked to certain enforcement action taken by Sain in his capacity as an election observer in an incident involving Vadra in an Assembly constituency in Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (CSM) Nagar”.
It further said, “The officer acted in accordance with the law and fully in conformity with the instructions of ECI.”