Rahul Gandhi on Friday described the special intensive revision being conducted by the Election Commission in Bihar as “institutionalised theft,” doubling down on his attack even as a news agency quoted unnamed sources in the poll panel as taking a jab at the Opposition leader. .
“Election Commission and BJP are working together to steal elections,” Rahul said on Friday, a day after he held a news conference to allege what he called a massive organised fraud to rig elections in India.
“EC knows we have caught them. SIR is institutionalised theft. Its aim is to steal the right of the poor to cast their vote. I am telling the poll officials, what you are doing is treason, it is against the country. It is critical we expose this theft,” the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said.
In Bengaluru, in the afternoon, Rahul said, “The Election Commission has asked me to submit an affidavit. They say I have to take oath. I have taken oath on the Constitution in the Parliament. Today when the people are asking questions based on our data, they have shut down the website. The EC knows if the people start asking questions their edifice will crumble.”
Though Rahul said the EC website down, The Telegraph Online checked electoral rolls were available for the states of Maharashtra, West Bengal and Rajasthan. Only in Madhya Pradesh, the site to the chief electoral officer says, the 'page does not exist'.
In an eight-minute video shared this morning on his X handle., Rahul gave another brief presentation of the “evidence” collected by the Congress on the “vote theft”.
“I am confident what happened here has happened in at least 100 seats,” Rahul said with the data from Mahadevpura Assembly seat in Bangalore South Lok Sabha constituency displayed on a screen. “If BJP had lost 10-15 more seats, Narendra Modi would not have remained the prime minister. There would have been an INDIA government.”
The chief electoral officer’s of Karnataka has asked Rahul to share the names of the voters that he had shared in his presentation made on Thursday afternoon, with a signed declaration.
"It seems that like always, Rahul Gandhi will give his claims and objections in Bihar's SIR only after the elections instead of giving them now," an Election Commission (EC) official was quoted as telling PTI.
According to the latest EC bulletin, since August 1 when the Bihar draft rolls were published, no political party has approached it with any request to add or remove names.
Rahul said the EC has repeatedly declined from providing the digital data of electoral rolls and the CCTV footage since they stand to be exposed once these are made public.
On Thursday, he had shared the data from only one constituency. On Friday morning, he listed out Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh among the states – all three won by the BJP – where he said he suspected the election process had been manipulated.
“In Uttarakhand, we lost the polls. I asked the candidate how many people voted for us in the locality where we held a roadshow. Thousands had attended the roadshow, none voted for us. In Madhya Pradesh during the Bharat Jodo Yatra I had seen terrible anti-incumbency but we won only 65 seats. This is impossible,” Rahul said.
“We found the evidence in Maharashtra. Magically voters were added and all those seats went to the BJP.”
The Election Commission has asked him to submit names of such electors under oath as per provisions of the Conduct of Election Rules.
Karnataka march
On Friday, Rahul along with the Congress president and leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge will join a protest march from Bengaluru’s Freedom Park to the Karnataka election commission office.
Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah, Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president and deputy chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretaries K.C. Venugopal, Randeep Singh Surjewala, KPCC working presidents, Ministers, as well as party leaders and workers will participate in the protest.