Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday intensified his demand for electoral transparency, urging the Election Commission (EC) to announce a clear timeline for sharing voter data in a machine-readable format after the central poll body agreed to hand over the voter rolls.
Taking to X, Rahul wrote, “Good first step taken by EC to hand over voter rolls. Can the EC please announce the exact date by which this data will be handed over in a digital, machine-readable format?”
The remark follows Gandhi’s recent article in the Indian Express, where he raised serious concerns about alleged manipulation during the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections. He claimed that the polls, won by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), were not conducted in a free and fair manner.
Jan Suraaj Party founder and election strategist Prashant Kishor asserted on Sunday that the EC has a responsibility to address the concerns raised by the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
“The Congress is the main Opposition party in the country. Rahul Gandhi is the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha. Hence, the EC should dispel any doubts that he has raised,” Kishor told reporters during an interaction in Begusarai, Bihar.
Kishor, who has worked with the Congress, emphasised the seriousness of Gandhi's claims. “Rahul Gandhi has not expressed his view not in a bite but in writing, through a newspaper article,” he said.
Earlier, in a Parliament speech on February 3, and in a news conference, Rahul had claimed that the EC had registered only 9.29 crore voters in the state for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and the number leaped to 9.70 crore during the Assembly polls in just a few months.
“Number of registered voters in Maharashtra in the 2019 Vidhan Sabha elections was 8.98 crore, which rose five years later to 9.29 crore for the May 2024 Lok Sabha elections. But a mere five months later, by the November 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections, the number had leaped to 9.70 crore. A crawl of 31 lakh in five years, then a leap of 41 lakh in just five months. So incredible was this leap that the registered voter total of 9.70 crore was even greater than the 9.54 crore adults in Maharashtra according to the government’s own estimates,” Gandhi wrote, labelling fake voters as another step in BJP’s electoral ‘match-fixing’.
On Sunday, the EC issued a point-by-point rebuttal to Gandhi’s article. But Kishor maintained that further clarification was essential. “As such, if doubts remain in people's minds about the fairness of the electoral process, it would not be good for a democracy. Hence, the EC must come forward and dispel all misgivings,” he said.
As the political discourse heats up, demands for greater transparency and accountability from the EC are likely to remain in focus, especially with several key state elections on the horizon.