By Anant Gupta
On Thursday night, Meta took down a viral video that purported to show Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Shankharav Sarkar going behind the screen of a polling booth where an electronic voting machine was placed during the bye-election for West Bengal’s Rejinagar Assembly constituency on October 6.
The video, posted by Golam Nabi Azad, the BJP’s principal opponent in the seat, was removed in compliance with a legal request from Indian authorities, according to a message that Meta overlaid on the post. The Aam Janata Unnayan Party leader in his Facebook post had described the bye-poll as an “unprecedented farce in the name of democracy”.
He alleged, “The BJP candidate himself has looted votes!”
On Tuesday, Scroll reporters in Rejinagar witnessed the police turning away Muslim voters from some polling stations. Opposition workers alleged that they were intimidated in the lead-up to the vote and some independent journalists said that the social media pages through which they disseminated their videos had also been blocked.
When the results of the bye-election in Rejinagar were announced on Friday, Sarkar was declared the winner with 1,29,914 votes, while Azad received 54,098 votes. In Nandigram, the other constituency in West Bengal in which a bye-poll was held, Hasirani Rath of the BJP beat Milan Pradhan of the Congress by 1,22,753 votes.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
