Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday turned up the heat on the Election Commission by asking it to release a digital voters’ list and CCTV footage from poll booths for the last 10 years, amplifying his vote-theft claim a day after dropping his “atom bomb” on bogus voters.
Addressing the “Vote Adhikar Rally” at Freedom Park in Bengaluru, Rahul alleged that the EC and the BJP colluded to "steal" the Lok Sabha elections and the data that the party had uncovered in Karnataka was proof of crime.
Rahul had on Thursday alleged that the Mahadevapura Assembly segment under the Bengaluru Central parliamentary seat had more than 1 lakh bogus voters during last year’s parliamentary polls. Rahul asked the Congress government in Karnataka to investigate the "vote fraud" and take action against the officials involved.
Posing five questions to the EC, he said: "Why are you not giving voter lists in a digital machine-readable format?”
"Why are you destroying video evidence?”
"Why is the EC committing massive fraud in the voter lists?”
"Why is the EC threatening the Opposition instead of answering our questions?”
“Why is the EC behaving like an agent of the BJP?”
Rahul said the Karnataka polls had indicated that the Congress would get 15-16 seats from the state in the last Lok Sabha elections. "We were ahead in 16 seats, but we won only nine. Following the defeat, we started asking whether we really lost those seats. When we urged the EC to release the voters’ list and CCTV footage, they turned a deaf ear. They then decided to change the law on providing the videos," Rahul alleged.
He accused the EC of helping the BJP keep Prime Minister Narendra Modi in power. “The EC is helping the BJP destroy the electoral system,” Rahul said.