A day before, Rahul Gandhi, a Congress leader and others were also briefly detained in New Delhi when they tried to march toward the Election Commission headquarters. Gandhi had raised the issue on 7 August and has since succeeded in mobilising widespread opposition support. Assertions have been mocked by both the Election Commission and the BJP.
The accusations of Rahul Gandhi and the answer from the Election Commission
Based on electoral data provided by the Commission, Gandhi accuses a large-scale manipulation of hundreds of millions of voters during the parliamentary elections in 2024. He says in Mahadevapura( a part of the Bangalore Central constituency), around 1 lakh falsified entries were made with multiple names, wrong addresses, and bogus mass registrations from a single place. Excellent referred to, among others, a voter who he said "voted twice", erased CCTV polling clips and 80 people registered at the same address.
Gandhi has said his party lost at least 48 seats because of these irregularities. In the last elections, Congress took 99 of 543 seats, and the BJP secured 240. He also has insisted that the Commission should release digital voter rolls for public audit.
The Election Commission termed these allegations as "wholly incorrect, without any basis and false," asking Gandhi to either file an affidavit or apologise. The report also mentions that Congress did not submit any formal objections to the voter roll revision. The Commission further stated that the CCTV footage is kept only for 45 days after the results. The leaders of the BJP have alleged that Gandhi is destroying democratic institutions and spreading anarchy.
The Bihar Voter Roll controversy and its national overtones
The row comes at a time when there is another tussle over the ongoing month-long revision of the voters' roll ahead of Bihar's state elections in November. A new Special Intensive Revision for the first time since 2003 aimed to scrub duplicate and dead voters, but has been hit by allegations of inaccuracies and being used as a form of voter suppression, notably against migrant populations and minorities.
Election Commission data shows these 6.5 million deletions in Bihar comprised 2.2 lakh dead voters, 70,000 duplicate entries and 36 lakh whose names were deleted because they had migrated. Response places will stay open till 1 September, with more than 165,000 applications up until now. There will be a similar review nationally.
The country's top court, which is seized of related petitions, commented that the issue seems to be "a trust deficit" and that it will intervene if a case of mass voter exclusion is established. Countering it, Gandhi had tweeted on Sunday, saying systematic manipulation of India's elections is taking place, and this is one example (of a 124-year-old voter in Bihar) among them.
