Rahul Gandhi finally dropped his “atom bomb” on Thursday, alleging that a Bengaluru Assembly segment with an electorate of a little over 6.5 lakh had more than 1 lakh bogus voters during last year’s parliamentary polls.
Election authorities asked Rahul, the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, to file formal complaints on an oath of truth.
Rahul cited the example of the Mahadevapura segment in the Bengaluru Central parliamentary seat to make his case that electronically readable electoral rolls should be provided and CCTV footage from polling stations made public.
The Election Commission (EC) currently provides hard copies and uploads PDF files of the rolls, and examines CCTV footage internally.
In a TED-style talk, Rahul said that of the 100,250 allegedly bogus voters at Mahadevapura, some 11,965 were “duplicate voters” — registered in more than one booth — and 40,009 had fake or invalid addresses.
He said 10,452 were “bulk voters” — dozens of voters registered at the same address — 4,132 entries had no photos, or images that were too small; and 33,692 names had been added through the “misuse of Form 6” — the voter registration form.
He attributed the Congress’s defeat from the Bengaluru Central seat — which the BJP has held since it was carved out in 2009 — to this “manipulation”.
The BJP’s victory margin was 32,707 votes. However, it led by 114,046 votes from Mahadevapura.
Portions of the rolls that Rahul displayed in the form of slides purported to show the same voters registered in up to four booths in the Assembly segment. Some seemed to have been registered in other states like Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, too.
Some addresses had door numbers recorded as “0”. Others were commercial establishments like breweries. A single-room house accounted for 80 registered voters.
The poll panel has, at least since 2016, used digital tools across India to detect entries on the electoral rolls that have similar photos and demographic data.
“Since 2021, some 5 crore duplicates were deleted through this,” a former chief election commissioner (CEC) told The Telegraph.
“We found people aged up to 70, 80 years old registered as voters through Form 6,” Rahul said.
He cited the example of 70-year-old Shakuni Rani, registered as a voter in Mahadevapura twice in two months at different booths. She voted twice, according to polling agents, Rahul said.
“If the EC now does not give us electronic voter data — not only of that election but of the last 10-15 years, and if they do not give us CCTV footage, they are partaking in the crime…,” he said.
“There are going to be consequences for every single polling officer who is doing this. It doesn’t matter how senior or how junior you are, one day the Opposition is going to come to power and then you see what we are going to do to you.”
Form 6 is used for the registration of any voter irrespective of age, including voters whose names have earlier been deleted. Most of them tend to be under 25, though.
In Kamal Nath versus the Election Commission in 2018, the Supreme Court had upheld the existing provisions about the poll panel providing hard copies and PDF files of rolls. It had said the commission did not need to give a “searchable pdf”.
Then CEC Rajiv Kumar had in January dismissed the idea of making CCTV footage public, saying: “Machines (learning from disclosed CCTV footage) will create so much AI content on social media that we won’t be able to know what is genuine.”
The chief electoral officers (CEOs) of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Haryana — states where Rahul alleged malpractices took place — issued identical statements asking him to complain under rule 20(3)(b) of the Registration of Electors Rules, which would require him to submit proof under oath.
The Uttar Pradesh CEO said that two Mahadevapura voters shown in Rahul’s slides as voters (also) from the heartland state had not been found on its rolls.
Asked to respond to this, Rahul said: “I am saying this publicly to everybody. Take it as an oath. This is Election Commission data. They haven’t denied the information.... Why don’t you say that ‘We are wrong?’ Because they know the truth and we know that you have done this across the country.”
A poll panel post on X made no mention of any inquiry into Rahul’s claims. It said that if he was telling the truth, he should submit the complaint on Thursday evening, or “…he should stop arriving at absurd conclusions and mislead the citizens of India”.
The BJP echoed this, with its ministers and spokespersons attacking Rahul.
The party’s IT head, Amit Malviya, said: “Karnataka was under a Congress government during the 2024 elections. If voter list manipulation was even remotely possible, it was the Congress that had both the motive and means — since the Election Commission staff and CEO officers are drawn from the state government.”
He added: “Let’s look at Malegaon Central, part of Dhule Lok Sabha seat in Maharashtra — the very state where Rahul is weaving his conspiracy theory. BJP was comfortably ahead in 5 out of 6 assembly segments. But in Malegaon Central, Congress secured 42 votes for every vote of BJP, flipping the result.”
The INDIA allies backed Rahul. Shiv Sena (UBT) parliamentarian Priyanka Chaturvedi said: “Why is the government running away from debating the working of ECI & accountability/ transparency of votes on the floor of the House? The logjam is government’s deliberate attempt to block any discussion on this issue.”
Later in the evening, Rahul briefed leaders of the INDIA grouping on the “vote theft” when they gathered at his new residence for dinner.