In a series of grave and strongly worded allegations, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday claimed that the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections were “stolen,” accusing the Election Commission of India (ECI) of colluding with the ruling BJP. He also flagged alleged large-scale voter list manipulation in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura constituency, raising broader concerns about the credibility of electoral processes in the country.Speaking at a press interaction, Gandhi said his party had long suspected irregularities in the Maharashtra polls, and the final results confirmed their worst fears. “The Maharashtra results confirmed our suspicion that the assembly election was stolen,” he said. “The Election Commission refusing to provide a machine-readable voter list convinced us of its collusion with the BJP.”Citing figures, Gandhi alleged that between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections in Maharashtra, over one crore new voters were added to the electoral rolls within just five months—more than what had been added over a span of five years. This sudden spike, he said, raised serious questions. “And then something very interesting they did. They said they are going to destroy the CCTV footage. This was surprising because there was a question in Maharashtra about a massive voting after 5.30 PM for the numbers to add up. Our people knew that in the polling booths, no such thing happened,” he said.Gandhi contended that the absence of evidence to justify the late surge in voting, combined with the ECI’s decision to destroy CCTV footage, pointed to “reasonable certainty” of institutional collusion. “What is the crux of the problem? The voter list is the property of this country. The Election Commission refuses to give us the voter list,” he added.The Congress leader also shared the difficulties his team faced while analysing the voter data provided by the EC, the LoP provided an image ofthe stacks of paper with the EC data . “This is a challenge here. This is seven feet of paper. Let’s suppose I want to find out if you have voted twice or if your name occurs twice in the voter list, I have to take your picture and then I have to compare it to every single bit of paper. That’s the process, and it’s a very tedious process,” he explained.He added that his team had initially planned to examine multiple constituencies, but the manual nature of the documents made it nearly impossible. “This task took us six months… If the Election Commission gave us electronic data, it would take us 30 seconds. I repeat, this is why we are being given data like this, so that it is not analysed,” Gandhi said. He alleged that the printed lists were intentionally provided in formats that did not support optical character recognition (OCR). “These papers do not allow for OCR. So if you scan them, you can’t get the data out of them. Why is the Election Commission protecting these pieces of paper? EC deliberately provides non-machine-readable papers,” he charged.In Karnataka, Gandhi alleged that over one lakh votes were fraudulently cast in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency out of a total of 6.5 lakh. “There was ‘vote chori’ of over one lakh votes,” he said, further alleging that the Congress research team had found large numbers of duplicate voters, invalid addresses, and bulk entries in that constituency.The Congress leader also raised broader concerns about the growing disconnect between pre-poll surveys and final results, particularly in states like Haryana and Madhya Pradesh. “Anti-incumbency is something that hits every single party in every single democracy. But for some reason, the BJP is the only party in a democratic framework that basically does not suffer this idea of anti-incumbency,” he said. “Exit polls, opinion polls, our own internal polling were all showing a different picture. Then suddenly, we find the result is in the opposite direction with massive swings.”While the Election Commission has not officially responded to these fresh allegations, the statements mark an escalation in the Congress party’s ongoing confrontation with the ECI. Gandhi’s remarks come amid calls for greater transparency in electoral processes and access to verifiable voter data. (This is a developing story)
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