AAP's lavish campaign for Benaulim ZP elections raises eyebrows -- By Nisser Dias

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is pulling out all the stops to recapture the Benaulim Zilla Panchayat seat it lost due to disqualification. The sheer volume of money being poured into the five villages of the Benaulim constituency is alarming and raises serious questions about the party's ethics and priorities.

Local MLA Venzy Viegas seems obsessed with winning the seat, driven by his insatiable ego and dictatorial ways of functioning. In the villages of Cavelossim, Carmona, Orlim, Varca, and Benaulim, the streets are flooded with people of all ages wearing yellow AAP t-shirts, aggressively canvassing door-to-door to distribute fliers and urging voters to back their candidate. The visual irony of the Indian Meteorological Department's yellow alert is starkly reflected in AAP's over-the-top campaign.

In Benaulim, even the elderly are being roped into this campaign. An 80-year-old was spotted in the early hours, struggling to distribute pamphlets glorifying Venzy Viegas’s past achievements and making hollow promises for the future.

There are allegations that each campaign volunteer is being paid Rs. 1,000 per day. This might explain the unusual sight of an octogenarian participating in the AAP roadshow. The question then arises: where has AAP suddenly sourced such substantial funds?

The Election Commission of India has set a spending limit of Rs. 5 lakhs per candidate. However, the AAP candidate's expenditure seems to have blown past this ceiling. Beyond the mass production of fliers and t-shirts emblazoned with the party's name and symbol, there is a conspicuous absence of the 'INDIA Alliance' branding on the jerseys, which raises further suspicions.

Has APP candidate for ZP liquidated all his assets just to win this inconsequential election, which has a mere one-and-a-half-year term? Are there benefactors generous enough to bankroll these exorbitant election expenses? Are hundreds of volunteers so captivated by a party whose top leaders, including Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, are entangled in a liquor scam, that they abandon their daily lives to campaign? Is this lavish spending rooted in the alleged liquor-gate scandal?

These critical questions demand immediate answers. The extravagant spending and questionable tactics employed by AAP in this minor ZP election cast a long shadow over the party’s integrity and priorities.

It is imperative that the Election Commission and other relevant authorities scrutinize these expenditures and hold those responsible to account.