PATNA: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence over alleged vote “theft” in Maharashtra, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, saying the Prime Minister had failed to answer his questions on the issue.Responding to Modi’s remarks on the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls during his visit to Gaya in Bihar, Rahul alleged that the Prime Minister was deliberately silent on the contentious matter.”The SIR is an attempt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP and the EC to steal your votes. They are trying their best to snatch your voting rights. The ‘vote chor’ came to Gayaji, but he did not say even a word on his government’s attempt to steal votes with the help of the EC,” Gandhi said during his Vote Adhikar Yatra in Bhagalpur.“The truth is that the Prime Minister, along with the Election Commission of India and the Bharatiya Janata Party, are bent on destroying democracy and the Constitution, and snatching away the votes of the people,” he said.Rahul accused Modi of seeking to dismantle the constitutional principle of “one person, one vote.” He cited the example of a Congress supporter whose name was deleted from the electoral rolls during the first phase of the revision exercise.“With SIR, the Modi government, in collusion with the Election Commission of India, was disenfranchising people who are supporters of Congress or RJD,” the Lok Sabha LoP said.”Vote Chori is an attack on the Constitution of India. The INDIA bloc will not allow the BJP to steal voting rights of the people of Bihar,” he added.Speaking at a rally in Bihar, Modi in an indirect reference to SIR said, “There is one more threat — that of infiltrators (ghuspaithiye) that our nation faces, which I also spoke about in my Independence Day speech. They cannot be allowed to partake of the resources of our country. I have, therefore, called for a demography mission. But the Congress and the RJD want to protect these infiltrators for the sake of their vote bank politics.”The allusion was to one of the stated objectives of SIR being the removal of names of “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar” from the electoral rolls.The EC, which has ordered the exercise in Bihar ahead of assembly polls, has made it clear that SIR will be undertaken across the country in due course. However, the INDIA bloc has been alleging that the exercise in Bihar was aimed at “helping” the BJP-led NDA in assembly polls through wrongful deletion of names of voters.During a stopover near Nathnagar in Bhagalpur, Rahul introduced a former Agniveer, Amarnath Jaiswal, who had suffered a serious hand injury and lost a finger in the line of duty.Jaiswal was discharged from the Army within two years, without any of the benefits that a regular soldier would have received in such circumstances.Rahul said the Modi government had closed avenues for the youth, calling the Agniveer scheme “ill-advised” and pointing to Jaiswal’s plight as an example of how recruits were left without support after service, even in cases of disability.He also said the government had crippled small and medium businesses through demonetisation, compounding unemployment.On the sixth day of his Yatra, the march passed through Bhagalpur, where large crowds gathered, chanting ‘Vote Chor, Gaddi Chhor’ in reference to alleged electoral fraud in Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra and Karnataka during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
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