India’s election system is dead, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Saturday, two days after he said US President Donald Trump was right when he classified India’s economy as dead.
Addressing his party’s annual legal conclave Saturday morning in Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan,
the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha doubled own on his allegations that the Election Commission of India was in cahoots with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
“The truth is that the election system in India is already dead. The prime minister of India is the prime minister of India with a very slim majority… If 15 seats were [not] rigged, he would not have been the prime minister of India,” Rahul declared.
“We are going to prove to you in the coming few days how a Lok Sabha election can be rigged and was rigged,” he added.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha election the BJP, which had set a target of 400 of the 543 seats, managed just 240 while the Congress performed its best in a decade at 99 seats.
This is not the first time Rahul Gandhi has claimed to have proof of what he calls the Election Commission of India “rigging” polls for the BJP. On Friday, he had claimed that what the Congress’s “investigation” had discovered was like to an atom bomb that woul blow up in the face of the poll panel.
The Election Commission on its part had announced on Friday that it would “ignore baseless allegations made on a daily basis.”
Since the Maharashtra Assembly poll results, where the Congress and its alliance partners in the Mahavikas Agadhi received a drubbing within a few months of a spectacular show in the Lok Sabha polls held in the summer, Rahul has been consistently alleging that the EC had manipulated the polls.
Other than some data – including an independent one carried out by the news portal Newslaundry – the Congress is yet to offer any other evidence to substantiate the claims.
“Since 2014, I have had suspicions about the election system,” Rahul said on Saturday. “The ability to win with a sweeping victory is surprising. What happened in Maharashtra made me take this issue seriously. I couldn’t speak without proof, but now I say with no doubt that we have proof.”
He once again promised to present evidence.
“We have such proof that will show the whole country that the institution of the Election Commission does not exist. It has disappeared,” Rahul told the delegates at the legal conclave. “It has taken us six months of nonstop work to find this proof. You will see with zero doubt how a Lok Sabha election is stolen; 6.5 lakh voters vote and 1.5 lakh of those voters are fake.”
Rahul’s latest salvo at the central poll panel has come at a time when a special drive in poll-bound Bihar has just been concluded aimed at cleansing the voters list, which the Opposition parties say is an exercise in disenfranchising millions of poort voters.
Rahul’s detractors have often said that he criticises electronic voting machines after the Congress loses an election and not when it wins. On Saturday, Rahul signalled he was in no mood to back down.
“My sister [Lok Sabha MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra] told me I was playing with fire, and I said I know I am playing with fire, and I will continue to play with fire. Eventually like most of you I am going to end up in the fire,” he said.
“My family taught me not to be scared of cowards. The most cowardly thing you can ever do is to be scared of a coward. And that is exactly what we are dealing with. The ruling ideology is based to a great extent on cowardice.”