EC must inquire and not evade

Whether what Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi detonated on Wednesday was a hydrogen bomb or some other kind, he succeeded in convincing many that the Haryana Assembly elections were far from free and fair.

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His central claim—that as many as 25 lakh fake voters were created through a centralised “Operation Sarkar Chori’—cannot be brushed aside merely as political theatrics, especially when accompanied by concrete evidence and verifiable examples that demand close examination by independent authorities. According to Gandhi, despite all the ground reports and exit polls predicting a comfortable Congress victory, the party lost by a wafer-thin margin, with less than 25,000 votes separating it from the BJP. He has produced data to show that 124,177 voters had identical photographs, some appearing 223 times under different names, and that a foreign models picture was allegedly used on voter identity cards in multiple constituencies. The scale of duplication he describes—more than five lakh duplicate voters—is staggering enough to