Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday dropped his promised “hydrogen bomb” as he claimed that the 2024 Haryana Assembly polls were “stolen”, citing electoral roll data to flag “25 lakh fake voters” and revealing how a Brazilian model was part of the “centralised operation” to hijack the elections.

Accusing the Election Commission of colluding with the BJP to ensure its victory, Rahul said the Brazilian model’s photograph was used 22 times in 10 booths in the Rai Assembly constituency alongside names such as “Seema, Sweety and Saraswati”.

At a media conference, during which he put up a presentation titled “The H-files” to back his claim, Rahul pointed out that the Congress lost eight Assembly seats to the BJP in Haryana by narrow margins — cumulatively by 22,779 votes — in an election where the Congress won 37 and the BJP 48 seats.

The Congress leader’s charge comes a day before the first phase of polling in Bihar.

The leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha had raised similar allegations of vote manipulation in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura Assembly segment. He had claimed that more than one out of seven entries on the rolls in the constituency during the 2024 parliamentary polls were fake. Although some of these “fake” voters turned out to be real, the EC put the onus of filing individual plaints against them on Rahul. The EC’s move was flayed by former election commissioners who expected it to probe the allegations on its own.

On Wednesday, Rahul struggled to explain how so many bogus voters escaped the scrutiny of the Congress’s polling agents and campaigners. The party has a significant presence in Karnataka and Haryana.

“You may be asking... how come you didn’t see these anomalies in the voter list? Because the voter list is given to us at the last minute before the elections,” he said.

The “sarkar chori” in Haryana, as he called it in his TED-style presentation, happened through duplicate voters, invalid addresses and bulk voters, Rahul claimed.

“Notice that we have left those two (fields in a chart) empty, misuse of Form 6 (voter registration) and Form 7 (voter name deletion). The reason is that the EC now no longer allows us to access it. After Mahadevapura, where we accessed Form 6, they have stopped it....

“So we cannot give you the number of deletions in addition. We estimate that at least in Mahadevapura, misuse of Form 6 was about 30 per cent of the total malpractice. So our estimate is those two will add up to another seven to 10 lakh,” he said.

Copies of applications to add, delete or modify names in the rolls are shared by booth-level officers (BLOs) with the booth-level agents (BLAs) of recognised parties. Let alone the Congress, even large cadre-based parties such as the BJP are often unable to nominate a BLA for every polling station.

The woman’s photo that appeared among the duplicate entries flagged by Rahul on Wednesday was traced to Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero.

Without naming the woman, Rahul said: “She is a Brazilian model. That’s a stock photograph, and she is one of 25 lakh such records in Haryana. This is proof of a centralised operation.... This is to create space so that anybody can vote, so that BJP people can move and vote, they can come from other states and vote.”

He showed similar examples of a single photo being used for hundreds of electors.

“And what is the proof they are doing it? They are destroying CCTV records. If we ask for CCTV records, CCTV records of this booth, we will know 100 per cent what happened in this booth,” Rahul explained.

Responding to Rahul’s media conference on Mahadevapura, chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had said in August: “Should the Election Commission share the CCTV videos of mothers, daughters-in-law, daughters, or that of any other voter?”

CCTV footage is currently available to unsuccessful poll candidates who file election petitions (EPs) in respective high courts within 45 days of the poll results, after which the footage is deleted.

“Since election petitions have been filed in both the Assembly constituencies (Rai and Hodal) among the 23 EPs filed with regard to the Haryana Assembly elections, Rahul Gandhi may be advised to use all his evidence there,” an EC official said on Wednesday.

Rahul said: “Now the EC can remove duplicates in a second.... They don’t do it. Why? Because they are helping the BJP.”

While election authorities use software to identify entries on the rolls with similar photos or demographic data, the law requires authorities to send notices to suspected bogus voters and delete their names only after field verification. The EC has not revealed if this has been done, but has maintained that the special intensive revision is being done for this purpose.

Video testimonies of several Haryana electors whose names were deleted after the Lok Sabha polls for reasons unknown to them were played at the media conference on Wednesday. Aggrieved voters of Bihar, where the SIR has been completed, also spoke alongside Rahul.

The Congress leader claimed that addresses were deliberately marked as zero in poll rolls to make them untraceable and that Uttar Pradesh BJP leaders figured on Haryana’s rolls.

Addresses are marked zero, nil or with a hash or hyphen when local bodies have not assigned a number to a residence or the voter is homeless.

“So you can understand that there was no election in Haryana. There was a theft in Haryana,” he alleged.

With photos of the then election commissioners — Rajiv Kumar, Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu on screen — Rahul said: “These gentlemen colluded with the BJP to ensure that the Congress could not win the election in Haryana. The EC is in partnership with the PM and the home minister, and they have destroyed the democratic foundations of this country.... This is something that has now been industrialised... it can be used in any state and it is going to be used in Bihar and I am confident that after the Bihar elections we will get the same records and we will show you that the same thing has happened in Bihar.”

Questioned by reporters on the way forward, he said: “The voter list integrity is not the responsibility of a political party.... It is the Election Commission that has to guarantee voter list integrity.... What the Election Commission does is try to put the onus on the parties to solve the problem.... If you want us to solve the problem, give us the entire database, and we will solve the problem.... But they don’t give us the database.”

Opposition parties have demanded machine-readable rolls, denied by the Supreme Court in 2019 on grounds of privacy.

India’s electoral rolls, unlike most countries, are published online in picture format. Voters can search their names in the current rolls. Researchers have, however, been converting existing rolls into machine-readable formats.

Union minister and BJP leader Kiren Rijiju accused Rahul of trying to incite youths to stage a Bangladesh-like coup.