Rahul renews ‘vote theft’ attack

Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said that there were attempts to delete the names of 6,018 voters in the Aland constituency of Karnataka in December 2022 and add the names of 6,850 “fake voters” in Maharashtra’s Rajura constituency in 2024, alleging that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar was shielding the people behind these attempts.

- Saubhadra Chatterji

Speaking at party headquarters Indira Bhawan in Delhi, Gandhi said the Karnataka crime investigation department (CID) wrote 18 times to the Election Commission of India (ECI) seeking details such as OTP trails and destination ports involved in such deletions, adding, “EC has not given it because this will lead us to where the operations are being done.”

He demanded that the CEC give this data within a week.

Inits response, ECI pointed out thatit too filed a first information report (FIR) following the unsuccessful attempt, and that the seat was won by the Congress in the May 2023 assembly election. The Congress's BR Patil won the Aland seat by 10,348 votes, defeating the BJP’s Subhash Gut-tedar. It also pointed out that voter names can’t be struck off online. “Allegations made by Rahul Gandhi are incorrect and baseless. No deletion of any vote can be done online by any member of the public, as misconceived by Gandhi. No deletion can take place without giving an opportunity of being heard to the affected person,” ECI said on X.

The BJP accused Gandhi of making “false allegations”.

“Rahul Gandhi's politics is limited to creating chaos, then playing victim and always trying to delegitimise democracy,” former Union minister Anurag Thakur said.