Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said on Monday that election commissioners were always present and never went missing, dismissing social media memes that referred to them as "Laapataa Gentlemen."
Addressing a press conference a day before the results of the seven-phase Lok Sabha election are declared, Rajiv Kumar said, “Social media meme pages are calling us ‘Laapataa Gentlemen'. But we were never laapataa (missing), we were always here.”
Recapping the recently concluded Lok Sabha election, Kumar stated that India set a world record with 64.2 crore voters, including 31.2 crore women, exercising their franchise this year.
He said over 68,000 monitoring teams and 1.5 crore polling and security personnel were involved in the world's largest electoral exercise.
The CEC also noted that only 39 repolls took place in the 2024 general elections, compared to 540 repolls in 2019.
Kumar also said the EC will ensure that next general election concludes by the end of April, having learnt its lesson from the relentless heatwave that claimed the lives of 33 on-duty poll workers.
The entire counting process was described as "absolutely robust," and all issues raised by multi-party delegations were addressed, he added.
Kumar said that the system of Indian polls allows for post-election scrutiny, however, the EC “failed to understand fake narratives of faulty voter lists and turnout data”.
Kumar shared that over 90 per cent of 495 complaints of Model Code of Conduct violations were disposed of during the 2024 general elections. He also stated that the EC successfully controlled the menace of deep fakes and AI-generated synthetic content during the election.
