Just a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 75th birthday, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi launched another fierce attack on the BJP and the Election Commission, accusing Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of “protecting the murderers of democracy.”
On Thursday, Gandhi held a press conference in Delhi where he dropped what he called a "vote chori hydrogen bomb," presenting documents he claims show systemic voter fraud carried out by the BJP in collusion with the Election Commission.
At the press conference, he asserted, "I do not make this statement lightly, but as the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The Chief Election Commissioner of India is shielding those who steal votes. This is clear-cut evidence; there is no ambiguity here," he accused.
He asserted that his allegations of election fraud were backed by '100% proof' and reproached the poll panel for failing to address repeated grievances from his Congress party. The Election Commission of India (ECI) rejected the accusations as 'incorrect and baseless', and the BJP also refuted the claims.
The Case of Karnataka's Aland
During a press conference in Delhi, Gandhi supported his allegations of vote theft with a well-prepared presentation. He pointed to instances from the Aland assembly constituency in Karnataka, claiming that over 6,000 voter names were removed from regions considered strongholds of his party. Minorities were being specifically targeted, he said, before presenting case studies from Karnataka's Aland.
"Aland is a constituency in Karnataka. Somebody tried to delete 6,018 votes," he alleged. "We don’t know the total number of votes that were deleted in Aland in the 2023 election. They are much higher than 6,018, but somebody got caught deleting those 6,018 votes, and it was caught by coincidence."
He stated that investigators in Karnataka have consistently requested fundamental digital clues from the EC that could reveal the source of the operation, but he accused them of disregarding these requests.
Previous Allegations of Vote Theft
In the previous month, Gandhi made a significant claim by accusing that more than one hundred thousand votes were 'stolen' in the Mahadevapura assembly area of Karnataka, describing it as an 'atom bomb on our democracy'.
Gandhi said the crime department of Karnataka police had been investigating these allegations since 2023 when the party first noticed missing names. The investigators, he said, "had written 18 letters in 18 months to the ECI", seeking details, but had not received any response. He called on "CEC Gyanesh Kumar to release the details within a week".
The Election Commission has dismissed the serious accusations of widespread voter fraud, labeling his assertions as "groundless" and "reckless".
