Addressing a press conference, Jan Suraaj Party state president Manoj Bharti said a memorandum to this effect has been submitted to the state's Chief Electoral Officer by "our high-level delegation".
He said, "Our memorandum has highlighted that BJP workers have been prowling the streets of Patna, posing as municipal corporation workers. They have been tearing our posters and banners off the walls of houses, even though we had obtained the consent of the owners".
Later, posters and banners of the BJP are pasted on the same walls, the Jan Suraaj Party leader alleged.
"When we have confronted some of these self-proclaimed municipal workers, demanding their identity cards, they have run away. The EC must step in to prevent this serious breach of the model code of conduct," Bharti said.
He also claimed that the BJP has also come out with a number of "false and misleading posters" targeting Prashant Kishor." The by-poll has been necessitated by the resignation of BJP national president Nitin Nabin, who got elected to the Rajya Sabha a few months ago.
Kishor, who seeks to rejuvenate his fledgling party, which was drubbed in the assembly polls held last year, has entered the fray, claiming that it was a "referendum" on the popularity of the BJP-led government in the state.
The BJP, which has never lost the seat since 1995, has this time fielded a low-key youth wing leader Neeraj Kumar Sinha, in what is being seen as a sign that the party is confident of a runaway victory in Bankipur.
Moreover, in the past few days, the BJP has left the Jan Suraaj Party rattled by weaning away a number of its leaders, some of whom had contested on its tickets in the assembly polls.
Bharti said, "We have urged the Election Commission to ensure that, unlike the assembly polls which were held in November, volunteers of the women's self-help groups were not deployed at polling booths or in the vicinity of these".
Incidentally, Kishor has been alleging that Jeevika volunteers, who were members of self-help groups, had virtually acted as agents of the NDA during assembly polls, when they had been made rural women pledge support to the BJP-led coalition, in lieu of a sum of Rs 10,000 each of them had received under "Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana".
Bharti also said that the Jan Suraaj Party memorandum has taken exception to "instances of personnel of central para military forces being let inside the polling booths which they are supposed to guard from the outside".
