The Election Commission on Thursday asked the Lok Sabha’s leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi to produce evidence of electoral roll manipulation, instead of using “dirty phrases” like “vote theft” to attack the central poll panel.
“The law for ‘one person one vote’ is already in existence since the first elections in 1951-52. If anyone has any proof of any person actually voting in any election, it should be shared with ECI with a written affidavit rather than colouring all the electors of India as ‘chor’ without any proof,” the central poll panel said in a statement.
The EC said that an attempt to create a false narrative by using “dirty phrases” like “vote chori” for Indian electors, was a direct attack on the crores of Indian electors and an assault on the integrity of lakhs of election staff.
Last Thursday at a news conference in Delhi, Rahul armed with data from the EC, gave the names of one Gurkirat Singh Dang (who is enrolled in four different booths in the Mahadevpura Assembly segment of Bangalore Central Lok Sabha), one Aditya Srivastava, who is a registered voter in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Lucknow and Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh as well as a 70-year old woman Shakun Rani who had registered twice as first-time voter in 2023.
Between August 7 and August 14, the EC has asked Rahul several times to file an affidavit under oath with the evidence.
Both Rahul and his sister Priyanka Gandhi, the Wayanad MP, have asked why an MP who has taken an oath on the Constitution must take another oath?
Since the Maharashtra Assembly polls of last year Rahul has on several occasions, including the floor of the Lok Sabha, has talked about alleged “vote theft” citing an influx of voters in several constituencies between the Lok Sabha polls of last May and the Assembly polls held later in the year.
“In Maharashtra, our alliance swept the Lok Sabha polls and in the Assembly polls our alliance was drubbed. We went to the EC and there was no response. We were convinced the Maharashtra elections were stolen. At that time we didn’t have the evidence,” Rahul had said during his news conference on August 7.
He had also questioned why the EC had refused to share machine-readable electoral rolls and CCTV footage from the polling booths.
Soon after Rahul’s “evidence-backed” claims, the BJP leaders including Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had questioned Rahul’s sanity.
On Wednesday, the BJP fielded MP Anurag Thakur who claimed large-scale inclusion of fake Muslim voters in four constituencies represented by Rahul, Priyanka, Akhilesh Yadav and Abhishek Banerjee in the Lok Sabha.
“Nullify the Lok Sabha elections, which were fought on the basis of a fake voters list, as proved by the ruling party MP Anurag Thakur. We took six months – because it was paper- to collect data for one assembly of Bangalore Central called Mahadevpura,” said Pawan Khera, Congress media and publicity cell chairman. “Thakur got the electronic voter list of six Lok Sabha seats within six days. If this is not collusion, what else is?”
“We demand that the EC and Anurag Thakur make the electronic voter list data of Varanasi public because he has access to the electronic voter lists. We know that the prime minister does not deserve to have won. Based on fake voters, he barely managed to win the Lok Sabha seat of Varanasi in 2024,” Khera said.
On Wednesday, Ajay Rai, the Uttar Pradesh Congress chief and Varanasi nominee in last year’s Lok Sabha polls, celebrated his “victory” over Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Though Modi retained the Varanasi seat for a third time, with a reduced margin, towards the early stages of counting the Prime Minister was trailing.
After Rahul’s vote thief barb at Modi, Rai had claimed he lost the polls to “vote theft and dishonesty.”