Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav met Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee at her residence here on Thursday and said a “multi-layered mafiagiri”, allegedly spearheaded by the BJP and the Election Commission, oversaw the “theft” of the Bengal mandate.

“The BJP, the commission, their associates, their spies, people underground... mult-layered mafiagiri, all came together to do the whole thing. They have stolen the entire vote,” said the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister.

The SP has 41 MPs and Trinamool has 42 (both Houses taken together).

“Nobody could imagine that an election could be manipulated like this,” he added.

While entering Mamata’s 30B Harish Chatterjee Street residence, after greeting her nephew and Trinamool national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee with a hug, Akhilesh draped a shawl across Mamata’s shoulders and said: “Didi, you fought
so well.”

The 71-year-old Trinamool matriarch said: “No but we....” “No no, Didi, you have not lost. You have not,” said the 52-year-old challenger-in-chief to Yogi Adityanath.

After a closed-door meeting, Akhilesh had a media interaction, where he said: “Elections took place at gunpoint in Bengal.”

“They were instructed by the handpicked officers, from the government level, to ensure TMC defeat,” he added, claiming that many of those officers — appointed by the Gyanesh Kumar-led EC — had been told by the BJP that they would be rewarded with good postings if Trinamool lost.

“How can democracy survive if the right to vote is taken away?” he asked, referring to the special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll by the EC under Supreme Court oversight.

The SP and others in the INDIA bloc have underscored that the difference between the number of votes polled by Trinamool and the BJP was only around 32.11 lakh. However, these parties said, the names of over 27 lakh people were removed from the voter list for “logical discrepancies” in the SIR and they could not exercise their franchise because their appeals could not be heard in time. Besides, 5.46 lakh voters’ names had earlier been deleted during the post-enumeration hearings.

The SP chief said the entire process of conducting elections had been changed with a malicious motive.

Virtually echoing Mamata’s allegation that the results of 100 seats were altered, Akhilesh demanded the release of CCTV footage from the counting centres.

“Abhishek and Didi are in (physical) danger,” he alleged, raising the murder of Chandranath Rath, Suvendu Adhikari’s aide.

He said Union home minister Amit Shah should be asked how the murder could take place now.

Expressing hope that Trinamool would be able to turn it around, Akhilesh expressed disappointment over the “democratic environment” in the country.

“Didi is a person of struggle. She will not lose hope. The BJP is patriarchal and feudal. That is why Didi has been targeted, because she is a woman, because she represents the other half of the population,” he said.

“I hope the people of the country will wake up to them, after all that has happened in Bengal,” Akhilesh added. “Nobody has destroyed democracy as much as the BJP. They can go to any extent for power.”

Asked to respond to Akhilesh’s charges, state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya said: “Zero plus zero equals zero. Zero minus zero equals zero.”