“Let’s not forget that the Prime Minister is in office with a very slender majority, just 25 seats. And we are saying to the Election Commission, you are not in the business of destroying Indian democracy, you are meant to protect it,” he said
Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Thursday made very serious allegations against the Election Commission of India, accusing it of “large-scale voter fraud” in electoral rolls since the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in “collusion” with the ruling BJP. Raising questions over the fairness of recent elections, he claimed a deep “nexus” between the BJP and the EC.
Addressing the media, he showed “evidence” of fake voters and fake addresses in recent Assembly elections in states like Maharashtra, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh which went in the favour of the BJP. Results from Maharashtra confirmed the INDIA bloc’s suspicion of electoral malpractice, he said
Specifically citing an example of a Lok Sabha constituency in Karnataka in the 2024 elections, he claimed “huge criminal fraud perpetrated by BJP through EC,” describing it as a “crime” against the Constitution. He also slammed the EC for demanding from him a signed declaration on his claims, saying that he had made the remarks publicly and they can “take it as an oath.”
“I am a politician, what I say to the people is my word. I am saying it to the people publicly, take it as an oath. Interestingly, they haven’t denied the information,” he said
Gandhi said they analysed the voter data of the Lok Sabha constituency of Bangalore Central and the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in it from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. “Our internal polls indicated that we were expected to win 16 seats in Karnataka (in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections). However, we won nine. We then focused on the seven unexpected losses and chose the Mahadevapura Vidhan Sabha constituency. All the data we have here is from the 2024 elections, sourced from the Election Commission.
“In the Mahadevapura Assembly segment, Congress received 1,15,586 votes and BJP 2,29,632 votes.
“Congress won all the Vidhan Sabhas except Mahadevapura, where the BJP swept and secured a victory margin of 1,14,046 votes. This seat significantly contributed to their election win, and the Lok Sabha result went in their favour on that seat,” he said.
“This discrepancy is a huge imbalance. We started examining the details and discovered that approximately 1,00,250 votes were stolen in the Mahadevapura Assembly,” he said, alleging fake names, duplicate entries, invalid addresses, and bulk additions to “influence the poll outcome.”
He also gave the example of one Gurkirat Singh Dang who appeared four times, in four different polling booths, with the same name and address. “And there are 11,965 such duplicate entries in just one constituency,” he said.
“There are fake addresses, which did not exist,” he added
“Why doesn’t BJP ever face anti-incumbency,” he also questioned, claiming a “pattern” that was becoming “increasingly hard to ignore.”
“Anti-incumbency hits every party in every democracy. But for some reason, the BJP is the only party that does not suffer from it,” he said. referring to Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra elections where opinion polls, exit polls, and even Congress’s internal surveys predicted very different outcomes
“Exit polls and opinion polls were saying one thing. Our internal polling showed the same. Then suddenly, the result moves in the opposite direction,” he added
“In Maharashtra, the addition of more voters in 5 months than in 5 years raised our suspicions. Then there was a huge jump in voter turnout after 5 pm, but our workers on the ground reported no such turnout. Something wasn’t adding up,” he said.
He also criticised the EC for refusing to share the voter list in a machine-readable format, making it nearly impossible for parties to properly audit the rolls. “Let’s not forget that the Prime Minister is in office with a very slender majority, just 25 seats. And we are saying to the Election Commission, you are not in the business of destroying Indian democracy, you are meant to protect it,” he said
