BJP’s Parvesh Verma, West Delhi lawmaker who was banned twice by the Election Commission for his inflammatory remarks in the run-up to the Delhi election, on Tuesday conceded his party’s defeat in the Capital.
In a comment to news agency Asian News International, Parvesh Verma also had a barb reserved for Aam Aadmi Party leader and education minister Manish Sisodia.
“I accept the result. We will work hard and give a better performance in the next elections,” Verma said, according to ANI.
He then pointed to the AAP’s insistence that the renewed mandate for the party was a recognition of the work that the Arvind Kejriwal-led government had done in Delhi, especially to fix state-run schools and hospitals in the national capital.
Verma said this did not appear to be the case.
“If this election would have been on education and development, then the education minister would not have been trailing,” he said.
It was a reference to the tough battle that Sisodia has faced in his backyard, Patparganj constituency where he has off and on, fallen behind the BJP’s Ravinder Singh Negi. At the end of the tenth round, Negi is leading with a margin of 1200 votes.
Parvesh Verma was gagged the first time for 96 hours for claiming that protesters at Shaheen Bagh will enter houses of Delhi’ites and rape your family.
After that, the Election Commission had barred him from holding any public meetings, public processions, public rallies, roadshows and interviews for 24 hours over his statement against Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on a news channel.
Shaheen Bagh has been the epicentre for the protests against the amended citizenship law that fast-tracks citizenship for non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The BJP leadership has projected the protests at Shaheen Bagh and the citizenship law as “anti-national” in character and claimed that it suited Pakistan’s narrative against India. It has blamed the AAP and the Congress for backing these protests.
Parvesh Verma had picked Shaheen Bagh even on the day of polling on February 8 as he tweeted a last-minute video appeal to voters to show up at election booths.
The Bharatiya Janata Party leader had said in the 82-second video that people of Shaheen Bagh, Jamia Millia and Seelampur “kind of places” were voting in large numbers in support of the AAP and appealed to “nationalists and patriots” to come out of their homes to vote for the “patriotic party”.