Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday leveled serious allegations of large-scale voter fraud in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura Assembly segment during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, accusing the Election Commission of colluding with the ruling BJP to influence the outcome. His remarks triggered a sharp backlash from both the BJP and the poll body.
Challenging Mr. Gandhi’s claims, the Election Commission issued a stern response, demanding that the Congress leader either take a formal oath and submit a sworn declaration to substantiate the allegations or withdraw what it termed “fabricated evidence.” The BJP, meanwhile, dismissed the accusations as “baseless,” claiming Rahul Gandhi was “losing his cool” after electoral setbacks.
Seeing the INDIA bloc’s surprising decline in the Maharashtra Assembly elections, held just months after a strong performance in the Lok Sabha polls, Gandhi questioned the integrity of the electoral process. The Opposition alliance, which secured 30 of 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, failed to maintain momentum in the state elections, falling short of the majority mark.
“The BJP appears immune to anti-incumbency. Pre-poll surveys indicated one result, but the actual outcomes were different in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh,” Gandhi said, alluding to what he called a manufactured narrative involving schemes and events like “Ladli Behna,” “Pulwama,” and “Operation Sindoor” that influenced voter sentiment.
He further alleged that the “choreographed” scheduling of Assembly polls by the Election Commission fueled suspicions. “In Maharashtra, more voters were added in five months than in the past five years. One crore new voters participated in the Assembly elections, and yet, our booth agents reported no visible surge in voting. The EC cited brisk polling by 5:30 pm, our data says otherwise,” he stated.
Gandhi said that the EC’s refusal to share digital voter rolls with the Opposition and its lack of transparency had intensified concerns.
He accused the commission of dodging questions rather than addressing them.
The Congress’s internal review, he revealed, focused on Mahadevapura in Karnataka after the party won only nine of the 16 seats it expected. “We suffered unexpected losses in seven constituencies. Given our constraints, we zeroed in on one Assembly seat under one Lok Sabha constituency, Mahadevapura, for a detailed investigation,” Gandhi said.
1 Lakh Votes were Illegally Manipulated
At a press conference on Thursday, Rahul Gandhi alleged a large-scale voter fraud in a Karnataka constituency, claiming that over 1 lakh votes were illegally manipulated. He cited specific irregularities, including 11,965 duplicate entries, 40,009 voters registered with fake or invalid addresses, 10,452 instances of multiple voters linked to a single address, 4,132 voters with invalid photographs, and 33,692 new voters allegedly registered through the misuse of Form 6.
