India News | ISF MLA to Abstain from Voting in Prez Poll
Get latest articles and stories on India at LatestLY. The lone ISF MLA in West Bengal assembly, Naushad Siddiqui said on Friday that he will abstain from voting in the July 18 presidential election as none of the two candidates for the post are to the liking of the party.
Kolkata, Jul 15 (PTI) The lone ISF MLA in West Bengal assembly, Naushad Siddiqui said on Friday that he will abstain from voting in the July 18 presidential election as none of the two candidates for the post are to the liking of the party.
He said that while ISF will never support the BJP-led NDA candidate, the opposition aspirant is also not acceptable to it owing to his past connections with the saffron party.
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ISF has its own ideology and will go forward with it, Siddiqui said.
"None of the two candidates are to our liking. While Droupadi Murmu is directly from the BJP, the other contestant Yashwant Sinha is a former BJP man," the Indian Secular Front (ISF) MLA told PTI.
Sinha, he said, had supported Narendra Modi after the Gujarat communal strife in 2002 and ISF will not support his candidature even though he is a consensus candidate of several opposition parties, including the Left Front and the Congress.
There are other opposition parties apart from the Left parties and the Congress and have their own characteristics. "Because the ISF had fought in the 2021 West Bengal assembly poll together with the Left Front and Congress, it does not mean it has to support the candidate they chose to put up."
ISF is the only opposition party other than BJP to have won a seat in the 2021 West Bengal assembly election. Its allies, the CPI(M)-led Left Front and Congress were totally vanquished.
The party was formed by Abbas Siddiqui, a Muslim cleric of Furfura Sharif in Hooghly district, before the state election.
Siddiqui claimed that BJP is causing harm to the interests of the country and damaging its respect globally.
"BJP has damaged India's respect abroad," he said alluding to the remarks made by its sacked spokesperson Nupur Sharma on Prophet Mohammad.
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)