Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday intensified his ‘vote chori’ attack against the BJP and the Election Commission, presenting what he described as evidence of systemic voter manipulation. At a press conference in Delhi, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha cited Karnataka’s Aland constituency as a case in point.
Rahul Gandhi’s latest salvo comes a little more than a month later. On August 7, Gandhi had alleged that the poll body was “colluding with the BJP to steal elections,” and cited the Mahadevapura assembly segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat as a key example.
On Thursday, Gandhi alleged that electoral rolls were being tampered with through software manipulation and fake applications, with minorities specifically targeted. “Aland is a constituency in Karnataka. Somebody tried to delete 6,018 votes,” he claimed. “We don’t know the total number of votes that were deleted in Aland in the 2023 election. They are much higher than 6,018, but somebody got caught deleting those 6,018 votes, and it was caught by coincidence.”
‘Centralised Operation’ Targeting Congress Strongholds
Explaining how the alleged tampering was uncovered, Gandhi said a booth-level officer discovered the deletions when her uncle’s name disappeared from the voter list.
“She checked who deleted her uncle’s vote, and she found that it was a neighbour. She asked her neighbour, but they said I did not delete any vote. Neither the person deleting the vote nor the person whose vote was deleted knew. Some other force hijacked the process and deleted the vote,” he said.
According to Gandhi, the deletions were not random human errors but part of a “centralised” scheme.
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“A software is picking up the first name in the booth and using it to delete votes. Someone ran an automated program to ensure that the first voter at the booth was the applicant. That same person got cell phones from outside the state and used them to file the application. This was not done at a worker level,” Gandhi alleged.
He further claimed that the deletions targeted Congress bastions. “The top 10 booths with maximum deletions were Congress strongholds. Congress won 8 out of the 10 booths in 2018. This was not a coincidence; this was a planned operation,” he said.
Attack on Election Commission
Stepping up his criticism, Gandhi accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of shielding those behind the alleged voter manipulation. “I am not saying this lightly but as the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The Chief Election Commissioner of India is protecting vote thieves. This is black and white evidence; there is no confusion in this,” he charged.
He added that Karnataka investigators have repeatedly sought digital leads from the Election Commission without success.
“There is an ongoing investigation into this matter in Karnataka. The CID of Karnataka has sent 18 letters in 18 months to the Election Commission, and they have asked the Election Commission for some very simple facts. Why are they not giving it? Because this will lead us to where the operation is being done, and we are absolutely convinced where this is going to go,” he said.
Gandhi also recalled his recent Voter Adhikar Yatra and reiterated that more revelations were coming. “My job is to participate in the democratic system. The constitutional institutions are not doing their job properly,” he said, adding that today’s press conference was not the “H-bomb” of evidence he had promised but that it was forthcoming.
