Rahul Gandhi Accuses ECI of Colluding With BJP to “Steal Elections”
Days after asserting he would expose “vote theft,” Congress MP and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, launched a scathing attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI), accusing it of colluding with the BJP to “steal elections.”
Speaking at a press conference, the Rae Bareli MP alleged large-scale voter fraud in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency, describing it as “bhayankar chori” (massive theft).
Holding up copies of voter rolls, Gandhi claimed that over one lakh fake or duplicate voters were included in the segment’s electoral list, which comprises approximately 6.5 lakh voters.
“An internal Congress investigation found over one lakh duplicate entries, invalid addresses, and bulk voters in Mahadevapura,” he told reporters.
The Bangalore Central constituency witnessed a close contest in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Congress candidate Mansoor Ali Khan initially led but eventually lost to BJP’s PC Mohan by a narrow margin of 32,707 votes.
Rahul Gandhi noted that Congress secured 6,26,208 votes to BJP’s 6,58,915, winning six of the seven Assembly segments. The party, however, lost in Mahadevapura by 1,14,000 votes.
Key Allegations by Rahul Gandhi:
- Total vote theft: 1,00,250 votes
- Duplicate voters: 11,965
- Fake/Invalid addresses: 40,009
- Bulk voters (single-address entries): 10,452
- Voters with invalid photos: 4,132
- Misuse of Form 6 for new voters: 33,692
Gandhi further accused the Election Commission of obstructing transparency by refusing to provide voter lists in machine-readable, electronic format. Instead, the Commission allegedly shared non-digitized, seven-foot-long paper printouts that cannot be scanned using optical character recognition (OCR).
“If we had digital data, we could verify duplicate entries in 30 seconds. It took us six months to manually analyze the Mahadevapura voter rolls.”
He also challenged the ECI, claiming that the fraud would be immediately evident if digital lists were shared. “Why are we being given paper lists that can’t be scanned? Clearly, they don’t want us to analyze the data.”
These allegations come ahead of a protest march being led by Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party in Karnataka against the ECI over alleged voter fraud.
In response, the Karnataka State Election Commission has asked Rahul Gandhi to submit a signed affidavit supporting his claims. The Commission also questioned why Congress had not filed a formal complaint earlier.
Meanwhile, sources within the ECI have reportedly called on Rahul Gandhi to submit verifiable evidence or cease making unsubstantiated accusations that mislead the public.
