NDA Wins MLC Polls; Modi and Adhikari Target Congress

New Delhi, October 28: The NDA’s victory in the recent Legislative Council elections has triggered a war of words between the ruling alliance and the Congress party, with senior leaders from the BJP camp mocking the opposition’s poor results.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah took to X to ask how many of the 28 seats Congress had won in the MLC polls.答え, as he put it, was “zero.” He also told the party to hand over its ballot box, a jibe that quickly gained traction online.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had raised the issue first. The elections covered 28 seats in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Karnataka, and were held through paper ballots. Modi asked the public to guess how many seats Congress had won, underlining the contrast with the opposition’s repeated complaints about EVMs.

West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari supported the Prime Minister’s position. In a repost of Modi’s message on X, he said Congress had not won a single seat among the 28 MLC constituencies in the four states, including Karnataka, where it is in government. He called the use of paper ballots the biggest irony, since it did not change the result.

Adhikari accused Congress of making excuses every time voters reject it, from blaming EVMs to spreading baseless conspiracies and tarnishing democratic institutions. He said the party’s anti-EVM campaign had now been discarded, having failed even when paper ballots were used.

He also asked whether Rahul Gandhi and his colleagues would now blame the ink on the ballot paper.

The Chief Minister said voters had delivered a clear message that Indians had completely rejected Congress and its leadership. He added that chaos and disarray attributed to Congress, the INDIA bloc and their supporters had not been able to hurt the NDA’s prospects.