‘Not my mistake’: Tejashwi says 2 EPIC numbers blunder poll body’s fault

Patna: RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav on Wednesday charged election authorities in Patna with “faulting him for their own mistake” by sending him a notice on having two EPIC numbers.

The former Bihar deputy chief minister also claimed that “a good reply” was being drafted for the notice, sent last week, which would “leave them with nothing to say”.

“I have received a notice not from the Election Commission but from the Patna district administration. A good reply is being drafted and upon receipt, they would be left with nothing to say. They are trying to fault me for their own mistake. Whose lapse is it if two EPIC numbers have been issued in my name? After all, I have been casting my vote from only one place,” said Yadav, who is the leader of the opposition in the state assembly.

Notably, he had last week conducted an online search of his EPIC number in the draft electoral rolls which yielded the result “no records found”.

Claiming that many other well-heeled persons, including senior bureaucrats, had their names struck off in the draft rolls published as part of the special intensive revision, Yadav had cast serious doubts on the efficacy of the mammoth exercise which, he has been alleging, was “an attempt to help the ruling BJP-led NDA in the upcoming assembly elections in the state”.

The district administration in Patna had come out with a rebuttal of Yadav’s allegation, sharing a screenshot of a portion of the draft electoral rolls in which names and photographs of the young leader, as also his father Lalu Prasad, the RJD president, could be seen.

However, Yadav stuck to his guns, charging the election authorities with “changing my EPIC number”, even as the NDA demanded that the RJD leader face trial for having two voter ID cards.