Rahul alleges mega 'vote theft' with Mahadevapura data; will Cong boycott polls?

In his most damning indictment yet of alleged rigging of polls by the Election Commission (EC) at the behest of the ruling BJP, Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi, on Thursday (August 7) meticulously laid out data of clear irregularities in the electoral rolls in Karnataka during last year’s Lok Sabha election.

Rahul’s revelations prima facie lived up to the claim he made some days earlier about having “black and white proof” that “elections in India are being stolen” and that when he makes his revelations, it would be akin to exploding an “atom bomb”.

If his presser fell short of being as explosive as an atom bomb, it was, in part due to his own baffling reluctance in spelling out clearly what his party plans to do next in terms of electoral participation given his own assertion that true electoral democracy was now “dead in India” and that “till the time the EC is compromised, it would not matter whether polls are held by EVMs or manually (by ballot papers)”.

Also read: Share names of voters wrongfully included: Karnataka poll officer to Rahul

Mahadevapura a case in point

Rahul outlined at the outset of his 72-minute-long press conference that the data he was about to present was of only one assembly segment, that of Mahadevapura in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat, as his party colleagues had “physically verified every single entry (in the electoral roll)” to discover the alleged irregularities. The Lok Sabha LoP, however, asserted that he was “confident” that similar manipulation of electoral rolls had been done by the EC “in collusion with the BJP” across “multiple constituencies all over India”.

The crux of Rahul’s revelations was simple – the BJP was benefitting electorally because of wide wide-scale addition of dubious voters; at times of the same voter across multiple polling booths. Rahul also alleged there were issues of voter deletion and voter suppression too, but admitted that he was not in possession of documentary evidence to prove his claim.

This voter addition, Rahul said, could be divided broadly into five different categories – those of duplicate voters, voters with fake or invalid addresses, bulk voters being registered with the same residential address, addition of voters without valid identifiable photographs, and lastly through the misuse of Form 6 (used for registering a new voter).

Images taken from a document released by the Congress, titled Vote Chori ('vote theft') are replicated here:

Alleging that the election was “stolen” by the BJP in collusion with the EC in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat last year, Rahul explained how Congress candidate Mansoor Ali Khan had lost the seat by a margin of 32,707 votes to the BJP’s PC Mohan. He then claimed that what had swung the seat in the BJP’s favour was the massive margin of 11,4046 votes that Mohan had led with against Khan in the Mahadevapura seat even though the latter had “swept the election in the other assembly segments”.

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Rahul alleged that over the past six months, a team of 30 to 40 Congress members had painstakingly analysed the voter list in Mahadevapura, and physically verified its entries as the EC had refused to share a “machine readable” soft copy of the electoral rolls with the Opposition. What the Congress team discovered, as per Rahul, was that as many as 1,00,250 voters in Mahadevapura fell in one or more of the five categories listed above.

'Multiple registrations', 'fake addresses'

Displaying documentary proof of his allegations through a power-point presentation at the press conference and physical ledgers purportedly containing the names listed out under each of the fraudulent categories, Rahul said Mahadevapura had 11,965 persons registered as voters in more than one booth. He said the names of 4,132 voters were added to the electoral roll without a valid photo ID, and 10,452 voters who fell under the category of bulk voters registered at a single address. A staggering 40,009 voters, Rahul claimed, were registered either with a fake or an invalid address, while another 33,692 voters were added through misuse of Form 6.

The Congress leader then went on to cite specific examples to prove his allegations. He showed one Gurkirat Singh Dang, who was registered as a voter in four different booths across Mahadevapura. Even more curious was the case of one Aditya Srivastava, who was registered as a voter not only across multiple booths in Mahadevapura but also in constituencies in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.

Similarly, Rahul showed a common address was listed in the electoral rolls for as many as 80 registered voters and then went on to show a photograph of the said address, which shockingly turned out to be a one-room apartment. In another such instance, a brewery by the name of 153 Beer Club was registered as the address for 68 voters but when a team of Congress workers went to the said address in search of these individuals, Rahul said, “they found these people don’t exist”.

Also read: Rahul Gandhi: EC colluding with BJP to 'steal elections'

‘New voters being manufactured’

Most fascinating, arguably, was the case of one Shakun Rani, a 70 year-old woman who not only managed to get herself registered as a new or first-time voter at two separate booths within Mahadevapura but, as per voting records collected by Congress workers from the two booths, had also cast her vote twice.

Citing the example of Shakun Rani, Rahul said a common refrain among political commentators has been that “new or first-time voters vote for (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi”. Asserting that a bulk of the 33,692 purportedly new and first time added to the voter list in Mahadevapura were not in the 18 to 25 year age group – typically the age bracket for legitimate Form 6 additions in electoral rolls – Rahul claimed new voters were “being manufactured” by the EC to “steal” the elections for the BJP.

The Congress leader went on to claim that he was “absolutely certain, confident” that assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana, held months after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, were rigged using the same model seen in Bangalore Central’s Mahadevapura.

It may be recalled that the Congress, Sharad Pawar’s NCP-SP, and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena-UBT had together swept Maharashtra during the Lok Sabha polls but suffered a wipe-out in the assembly polls held in the state just five months later. In Haryana, too, where the Congress had won five of the 10 Lok Sabha seats and garnered a higher vote share than the BJP, the saffron party stunned its rivals and pollsters alike with an unexpected and unprecedented third consecutive assembly poll victory within months.

‘Irregularities’ in Maharashtra, Haryana?

Ever since the poll reversals in Maharashtra and Haryana, Rahul has been relentlessly alleging that the elections in the two states had been rigged in favour of the BJP through mass-scale voter additions. On Thursday too, Rahul reiterated that more voters had been added to Maharashtra’s electoral rolls in the five months between last year’s Lok Sabha and Assembly polls than they had been in the five preceding years.

Also read: SC slamming Rahul: Has the court crossed boundaries? | Interview

The Lok Sabha LoP also said that he and his party colleagues had repeatedly petitioned the EC to share with them machine-readable soft copies of electoral rolls in these two states, but the poll panel rejected their request and provided only physical documents, which could not be scanned through “optical character recognition”. The EC has also rejected multiple requests from the Congress and wider Opposition for providing CCTV footage of polling booths on voting day. Later, the poll panel tweaked its Conduct of Election rules to allow destruction of polling day CCTV footage and other relevant data after 45 days of the conclusion of an election.

“Now we know why the EC doesn’t share machine readable format; it is because it doesn’t want the Opposition and the country to find out... the huge electoral fraud being perpetrated in the country by the BJP and the EC,” Rahul said, adding that the data of Mahadevapura analysed by the Congress should now be treated as evidence of the EC’s criminality in rigging elections and urged the “judiciary to get involved”.

Centre, EC rubbish charges

The explosive allegations made by Rahul have, predictably, been rejected by the BJP-led central government and the EC alike but without addressing any of the specific irregularities pointed out by the Congress leader. The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Karnataka has dared Rahul to make his allegations “on oath” while Union Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju claimed that the Lok Sabha LoP was merely “repeating a false report prepared by an NGO”

A combative Rahul responded to media queries about the Karnataka CEO’s challenge saying “I have presented data from the EC’s own records; these are not my documents... can they deny that these are not their records; my word is my oath”.

Also read: How SC reprieve to Rahul in China remark case got dwarfed by judge’s ‘political’ rebuke

What does, however, take away some of the sting from Rahul’s explosive presser is his reluctance to offer any direct reply to media queries on whether the Congress is, as suggested by RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, considering to boycott elections in the future if its concerns aren’t adequately addressed by the EC. “What action the Opposition takes in the future is a different matter,” was all Rahul said when asked repeatedly by reporters whether his party and the INDIA bloc would consider boycotting elections.

Will Opposition boycott polls?

Congress sources told The Federal after Rahul’s press conference that the Lok Sabha’s LoP “did not want to make any unilateral announcement on boycotting elections.”

A senior Congress functionary said, “he (Rahul) can’t speak for the entire Opposition without consulting parties of the INDIA Bloc; he has invited leaders of the INDIA Bloc for dinner today and this issue, along with other issues like the special intensive revision (of electoral rolls) going on in Bihar, the tariffs slapped by US President Donald Trump against India, the upcoming vice presidential elections, will all be discussed informally over dinner tonight... we will keep all of you informed of whatever we plan to do next; Rahul has already said that he will speak on the Bihar SIR when he goes to Bihar later this months; so please wait a while.”