NEW DELHI: A day after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that the BJP will not be able to cross the 200-mark in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav has echoed similar sentiments about the poll prospects of the saffron party.
Former Bihar deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav on Saturday said that the BJP would not get a majority to return to power in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Tejashwi – the younger son of veteran Bihar politician Lalu Yadav – predicted that the party ruling at the Centre would lose around 100 out of the 134 parliamentary seats in Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.
“Today the BJP has over 115 seats in Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. But in 2019, the BJP would lose around 100 seats in these states due to the kind of alliances that are coming up,” he said.
The young RJD leaders made these remarks at the India Today “Mind Rocks Youth Summit 2018”.
“There is no doubt that the BJP won’t get a majority in 2019 polls and they are going to lose,” Tejashwi said.
Driving his point home, he cited the example of recent Lk Sabha bypolls in Uttar Pradesh where the BJP was defeated due to the alliance between the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party.
“The Chief Minister (Yogi Adityanath) lost his seat of Gorakhpur in the by-polls early this year,” he said.
“The kind of situation that is there in Bihar and the kind of alliance that is coming up in Jharkhand, the BJP would face losses in these states,” he said.
When asked if in such a case there would be three Prime Ministerial candidates from the opposition, Tejashwi questioned, “Did any of the leaders in the Opposition claim to be the Prime Ministerial candidate?”
”Whichever party would be the single largest party would obviously stake claim to the Prime Ministerial post and the other parties would support it,” he said.
The former Deputy Chief Minister also called Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar as “cheat” minister.
“In 2019 Nitish Kumar won’t win anything. Today also he is a Chief Minister through the back door as he broke the grand alliance that was forged in the state ahead of the 2015 assembly polls. And look today who is in power in Bihar, it is BJP,” he said.
Remarks from Tejashwi came a day after West Bengal CM and TMC chief Mamata Banerjee said that the ruling BJP will not be able to go beyond 200-mark in the next general elections.
Trinamool Congress supremo also launched a blistering attack on the Narendra Modi government on Friday, accusing it of spreading blatant lies and threatening minorities.
Speaking to the CNN News channel, the firebrand TMC chief said, ”The BJP government at the Centre is ‘showing audacity and arrogance’. It has been spreading lies and rumours and targeting minorities.”
Stating that the Narendra Modi-led NDA government has failed in all respects, Mamata Banerjee said, ”Everybody is under threat today and people are scared of the BJP rule.”
While reiterating that power has made the BJP ”arrogant”, the West Bengal leader warned that the saffron party will be certainly defeated in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
”I can vouch for the fact that the BJP will not be able to cross the 200-mark in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections,” Mamata said.
“The BJP had secured only 31 percent votes and won 283 seats (in the 2014 General Election). It cannot be repeated again. They have failed in all respects and cannot survive (in the 2019 Lok Sabha poll),” she said during the ‘Rising Bengal’ programme.
There are 80 Lok Sabha seats from UP, 40 from Bihar and 14 from Jharkhand.
The BJP had won 73 seats from UP in the 2014 general elections along with its alliance partner Apna Dal.
Source: Zee News