Jaipur: Congress state president Govind Singh Dotasra Monday alleged that despite the BJP-Congress vote-share difference being less than 1% in the counting of around 10,100 wards, the gap in the number of wards won widened to nearly 500 due to an “unjust and unlawful” delimitation exercise, which he claimed cost Congress nearly 1,000 wards. The state has 309 urban local bodies (ULBs) comprising 10,245 wards.Addressing a press conference at the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) headquarters, Dotasra highlighted a decline in BJP’s vote share over the past two and a half years, from around 50% in the Lok Sabha elections to 35.3% in the recent ULB polls. “This means BJP has lost around 15 percentage points of vote share in just two-and-a-half years,” he said, noting the significance of these figures as ULBs have traditionally been a BJP stronghold.He referred to BJP’s past performance, noting they had an 8.12 percentage-point lead over Congress in the 2014-16 civic polls and a 2.2 percentage-point lead in the 2019-21 polls. Dotasra claimed that BJP’s lead in the current polls narrowed to less than one percentage point, despite the difference in the ward tally being around 500. He said, “If the unfair delimitation is excluded, Congress would have won around 1,500 more wards than BJP.”To support his claims, Dotasra cited the narrow victory margins in BJP-won wards, stating that of the 4,097 wards won by BJP, 1,316 were decided by margins of less than 100 votes, 772 by margins of less than 50 votes, and in 13 wards, BJP won by just one vote. He mentioned that Congress has sought recounting in the 1,316 wards where the margin was below 100 votes, alleging that results in some wards where Congress candidates led by 200-300 votes were delayed.
