Varanasi: Varanasi district Returning Officer (RO) on Tuesday issued a notice to Samajwadi Party candidate and former BSF constable Tej Bahadur Yadav to furnish a certificate on whether or not he was dismissed from the service for corruption or disloyalty to the government. [caption id=“attachment_6549581” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]
File image of Tej Bahadur Yadav, SP candidate from Varanasi. ANI[/caption] Tej Bahadur has to furnish the certificate before the RO till 11 am on Wednesday. The certificate will be issued by the Election Commission of India. “You have not submitted the certificate to the effect that whether or not you were dismissed from the service for corruption or disloyalty with your nomination papers,” RO Surendra Singh said in the notice. It further said: “You are directed through this notice to submit the aforementioned certificate till 11 am on 1 May , 2019.” Tej Bahadur, however, said that he had submitted all requisite documents and the notice was a conspiracy against him. He said, “I have submitted all of the documents. This is being done to make us stop from contesting the election.” “It is just a conspiracy against us. Modi ji is scared and it has been done intentionally,” said Tej Bahadur, who was dismissed from BSF in 2017 after complaining about the poor quality of food served to soldiers in a viral video. Yadav had posted four videos on social media in January 2017, which showed him complaining about unpalatable food at his camp along the Indo-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir. He was named as the Samajwadi Party candidate from the parliamentary constituency to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday. Earlier, he was in the fray as an independent candidate. Varanasi seat was won by Prime Minister Modi in the last Lok Sabha elections. He had defeated AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal with a massive margin of 3.37 lakh votes. The election in Varanasi is slated to take place in the last phase of seven-phased Lok Sabha elections on 19 May. The counting of votes will begin on 23 May.
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