NEW DELHI – Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, gave a critical speech at a large press conference on Thursday. He accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of “colluding” with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to “steal elections.” Gandhi showed what he said was proof that 100,250 votes were “stolen” in the Mahadevapura assembly segment of the Bangalore Central parliamentary seat. He said this was the main reason why the BJP won the 2024 Lok Sabha elections by a tiny margin.
Gandhi’s presentation, which he said was the outcome of a six-month-long inquiry by a team of 40 individuals, highlighted various apparent discrepancies in the voters’ list. He said that the fake votes he found fell into a number of groups:
Duplicate Voters: Allegedly, 11,965 people were registered to vote in more than one booth.
40,009 votes were determined to have fraudulent or invalid addresses.
Bulk Voters: 10,452 voters were members of big groups (60–70) that all lived at the same place.
Photos that weren’t valid: 4,132 voters had photos on the electoral rolls that weren’t valid.
Misuse of Form 6: 3,692 voters, most of whom were 95 to 98 years old, allegedly used a form designated for new voters to obtain their names on the list.
The accusations are especially important because the BJP’s P.C. Mohan won the Bangalore Central seat by 32,707 votes. Gandhi said that the Congress was ahead in all the other assembly segments of the constituency, but the BJP won Mahadevapura by 114,000 votes, which changed the outcome.
The Election Commission of India quickly responded to Gandhi’s assertions by asking him to sign a declaration and oath on the data, as required by Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. This part says that lying about something related to preparing electoral rolls is against the law. Gandhi replied boldly, “I am a politician.” What I tell folks is the truth. Take that as a promise.” He also concluded that the ECI was guilty since they didn’t give him machine-readable data, which he felt was an intentional attempt to cover fraud.
The BJP quickly spoke out against Gandhi’s claims. Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and senior MP Ravi Shankar Prasad termed his views “irresponsible and shameless,” and said that the Congress was part of a “larger conspiracy against India’s democracy and Constitution.” They wanted to know why Gandhi was now going after the ECI after the Congress had won 99 Lok Sabha seats. P.C. Mohan, the MP for Bangalore Central, said the claims were “just another drama” and asked why the Congress didn’t go to court with the evidence within the required 45 days after the election.
The chief election officers of Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Haryana have all written to Gandhi, asking him to give them the names of the voters he thinks are “wrong” and to sign the necessary declaration. The CEO of Uttar Pradesh also said that when they looked for the names that Gandhi had reported, they didn’t find any duplication in the state’s voter records.
Gandhi ended the news conference by saying that the party might take the issue to the Supreme Court and warned ECI officials that there would be consequences if the Opposition won. This latest public fight makes the political tensions between the Opposition and the ECI much worse. This is especially true because of the specific intensive updating of voter lists in states like Bihar.