Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday sharpened his 'vote chori' attack on the BJP and the Election Commission as he came armed with proof of systemic voter fraud, with Karnataka's Aland constituency as the prime example.
With a slickly made presentation to back up his vote theft claims at a press conference in Delhi, the Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition alleged that names were being struck off electoral rolls through software manipulation and fake applications. Minorities were being specifically targeted.
"Aland is a constituency in Karnataka. Somebody tried to delete 6,018 votes," Gandhi 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 detailed how the alleged tampering was discovered after a booth-level officer stumbled on the deletion when her uncle’s name disappeared from the rolls.
"She checked who deleted her uncle’s vote, and she found that it was a neighbour. She asked her neighbour, but they said I did not delete any vote. Neither the person deleting the vote nor the person whose vote was deleted knew. Some other force hijacked the process and deleted the vote," Gandhi said.
Gandhi said the deletions were not isolated human errors but a "centralised", automated scheme that exploited software and mobile numbers from different states to operate at a large scale.
"A software is picking up the first name in the booth and using it to delete votes. Someone ran an automated program to ensure that the first voter at the booth was the applicant. That same person got cell phones from outside the state and used them to file the application. This was not done at a worker level," he claimed.
The operation allegedly targeted Congress bastions specifically. "The top 10 booths with maximum deletions were Congress strongholds. Congress won 8 out of the 10 booths in 2018. This was not a coincidence; this was a planned operation," Gandhi charged.
Stepping up the attack, the Congress MP accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of shielding "vote chors" and undermining democracy.
"I am not saying this lightly but as the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The Chief Election Commissioner of India is protecting vote thieves. This is black and white evidence; there is no confusion in this," he charged.
He said investigators in Karnataka have repeatedly asked the EC for basic digital leads that could expose the operation’s origin — but, he charged, those requests have been ignored.
"There is an ongoing investigation into this matter in Karnataka. The CID of Karnataka has sent 18 letters in 18 months to the Election Commission, and they have asked the Election Commission for some very simple facts. Why are they not giving it?" the Congress leader said. "Because this will lead us to where the operation is being done, and we are absolutely convinced where this is going to go."
Earlier this month, after wrapping up his Voter Adhikar Yatra, the Gandhi scion had promised his party would soon drop a "hydrogen bomb" of irrefutable evidence of vote theft. Today’s presser wasn’t the promised H-bomb, he said at the outset, but it was coming.
"My job is to participate in the democratic system. The constitutional institutions are not doing their job properly," he said.
Last month, Gandhi dropped the 'vote chori' bombshell by alleging that over one lakh votes were "stolen" in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura assembly segment, calling it an "atom bomb on our democracy".
The Election Commission has rejected the explosive allegations of large-scale voter fraud, calling his claims "baseless" and "irresponsible".
Source: India Today