Rahul says EC colluding with BJP to rig elections; poll panel seeks affidavit

In his sharpest attack ever on the Election Commission, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused the poll body of colluding with the ruling BJP to steal elections and urged the judiciary to step in and save democracy. The EC asked him to make disclosures on oath and enable a probe.

Citing an internal Congress probe into the EC’s electoral rolls of the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency in Karnataka’s Bangalore Central parliamentary seat, Rahul claimed the presence of over one lakh fake voters as the factor that turned the results in favour of the saffron party in 2024. BJP’s PC Mohan had bagged this parliamentary seat.

The Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition went on to broadly allege that this “model of vote theft can be replicated across India, which is why the EC is not granting the Congress request to share machine-readable electoral rolls which would make the investigation into poll rigging easy”.

“This is a crime against the Constitution and the flag,” said Rahul while sharing details of a six-month Congress probe into the electoral rolls of Mahadevapura which, he said, revealed “duplicate voters, bulk single address voters, zero address voters and duplicate first-time electors”. The Congress MP claimed “bulletproof evidence of vote theft in Maharashtra and also Haryana where, he said, the Congress lost to the BJP by just eight seats and the vote gap between the parties was just 22,779 votes out of two crore voters in the state”.

Terming the Congress investigation as 100 per cent “evidence of rigging”, Rahul urged the judiciary to get involved and said, “what we love the most — democracy — no longer exists, it is gone”.

Even as Rahul was making his allegations at the AICC office, Indira Bhavan, here today, the EC responded, asking him to make related disclosures on oath and enable a probe.

Chief electoral officers of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Haryana — places where the Congress leader has claimed the Congress lost the elections due to rigging — shared on their X handles the legal format under which anyone apprehending voter fraud needs to make legal disclosures to enable an EC inquiry.

This declaration, under Rule 20 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, mandates the complainant to state the following on oath — details of voters proposed to be excluded/included, the fact that he knows making a false declaration on electoral rolls is punishable under Section 31 of the Representation of People Act and also knows that giving false evidence on electoral rolls is punishable under Section 227 of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, 2023. The EC said it would conduct a thorough investigation once Rahul made the statement on oath as per the provisions of the Representation of People Act.

“For us to act, we need the Congress MP to flag the alleged fake voters on oath to the CEOs of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Haryana. That is the law and the process. Also our proposed pan-India special intensive revision will address the very issues Rahul is raising,” the EC said today as Rahul asked the poll body to share machine-readable electoral rolls to enable wider investigation into the purity of voters’ data.

Rahul earlier today shared a presentation claiming “vote chori” in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura, the only Assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat where the BJP won in the 2024 LS poll.

“The Congress won all Assembly seats in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat except this one which the BJP won with a margin of over one lakh — 1,14,046 votes. And with this one seat, which the BJP swept, it won the Lok Sabha seat. Of six lakh votes in this Assembly seat, over a lakh were stolen,” alleged Rahul, saying that the ball to come clean was now in the EC’s court.

He reiterated the demand for electronic voter data and said, “If the EC does not share the data, it would mean they are partaking of the crime. There will be consequences of this. One day, the Opposition will come to power and then you (EC) will see what we do.”

Explaining what he called a “voter theft model”, Rahul alleged that in Mahadevpura, votes were stolen in five ways — by way of duplicate voters who were 11,965; voters with fake addresses (40,009); single address bulk voters (10,452), voters with invalid photos (4,132) and voters who misused form 6 used to register new voters.

The Congress MP gave specific examples to make the case, including Gurkirat Singh Dang who, he said, voted at four different booths; voters who were registered at addresses marked “zero”; and 70-year-old first-time voter Shakun Rani, who changed her name to vote twice.

“We have been told first-timers vote for the PM. But the reality is these first-timers are 60, 70, 80-year-olds and not 18 to 19-year-olds,” Rahul alleged.

He said colleagues visited houses in Mahadevapura where bulk voters were registered and did not find them there.

“We found no one at a single room address where 80 voters were registered. Our people were beaten up. In another case, we found no one residing at a local brewery, a registered address for 68 voters,” the Congress leader said.

Asked if the Congress would back Bihar ally RJD’s call to boycott the upcoming state elections, Rahul steered clear, saying, “What we do is a separate issue; our goal today is to tell the youth that their sacred vote is being stolen because the umpire is of the other team.”

He rejected the EC’s call to give a disclosure on oath and said he was making a public statement and it was up to the poll body to disprove the “criminal fraud being played on the country”.

Rahul dared the EC to take criminal action against him saying, “The EC would have acted against me had I been stating untruth. They know I am speaking the truth.”

Having dropped what he had described on August 1 as an “atom bomb”, Rahul said the Congress would on Friday hold a march in Bengaluru to protest the rigging of the 2024 LS poll in Karnataka where the party had estimated to win 16 seats and won just nine.

He alleged that the EC had been declining the Congress request for machine-readable voter lists because “if we were to scale up the Mahadevapura model to India, the reality of Indian democracy will be out”. The BJP needed to steal only 25 seats to stay in power in 2024 and “the PM is in power with a margin of just 25 seats”, he said.

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