In legalese, “beyond reasonable doubt” is regarded as the highest standard of evidence to establish the guilt or, in some cases, innocence of an accused. Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Thursday afternoon established what he called “reasonable certainty” of the “guilt” of the Election Commission, with seven feet high rows of paper displayed behind him.
“We had reasonable certainty that the Election Commission was colluding with the BJP in stealing elections,” Rahul said addressing a news conference in New Delhi’s Indira Bhawan.
“I want the nation to know there is a huge criminal fraud perpetrated in the country and it is being done by the EC and the party in power. This is crystal clear, undoubtable evidence,” the Congress leader said.
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Delivering on his promise of an “atom bomb” made a few days ago, Rahul added another layer to the multi-pronged attack unleashed by the combined Opposition against the Narendra Modi government, which includes the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar and US President Donald Trump’s 50 per cent tariffs on goods from India.
Rahul cited the example of Bangalore South Lok Sabha and the Mahadevpura Assembly seat, both in Karnataka, to prove his case against the Election Commission.
According to Rahul, in one Lok Sabha seat in Karnataka, 1,00,250 votes were “stolen” with the help of 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 voters with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 of the electorate among bulk voters living in same address, 4,132 voters with no photo in the identity cards and 33,692 voters introduced into the electoral rolls by alleged misuse of Form 6 for registration of new voters.
“This is one Gurkirat Singh Dang. His name appears in four different booths in the same constituency. There are thousands of such examples. Aditya Srivastava, he votes in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow and Kanpur and Maharashtra. There are 11,000 such voters who have voted multiple times,” Rahul said.
He also showed slides of papers resembling electoral rolls that showed voters residing in “House number zero” and father’s name listed as a bunch of letters thrown together.
“House number 85, a single room with 80 voters. When our team went to visit, they were beaten up,” Rahul claimed.
He also cited the example of one Shakun Rani, a 70-year-old woman, who he claimed had registered twice as a voter, first on September 13, 2023 and October 31, 2013.
“Shakun Rani or someone pretending to be her voted twice. The EC has said that it will destroy the CCTV footage from the polling booths, because they don’t want us to catch Shakun Rani voting twice,” said Rahul. “I will tell the EC, they are not in the business of destroying India’s democracy, they are in the business of protecting India’s democracy.”
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Rahul said his, the Congress’s and a section of the population’s suspicion on the conduct of elections was sparked by the absence of anti-incumbency towards the BJP.
“Anti-incumbency hits every party. BJP is the only party which does not suffer. Exit polls, opinion polls say one thing and the actual results are vastly different. Always a reason is offered, Laadli Behna, Pulwama,” Rahul said.
“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 iterated his demand for machine-readable electoral data.
The Election Commission has so far denied all the allegations raised by Rahul, the Congress and other opposition parties on the conduct of polls.
Minutes after Rahul Gandhi’s news meet, the Karnataka chief election commissioner reportedly said the Congress leader should submit an affidavit about his allegations.
The leader of Opposition’s salvo comes at a time when at least 65 lakh voters’ names have been deleted due to the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of voter lists in Bihar.
