Aland vote theft case: Karnataka court sets stage for trial against former BJP MLA Subhash Guttedar, other accused

The SIT has named seven people as accused: Subhash Guttedar, 74, the Former BJP MLA of Aland; his son Harshanand Guttedar; Thipperudra, personal secretary to the MLA; Akram Pasha, Aslam Pasha, and Mohammed Ashfaq, who are data centre operators in Kalaburagi; and Bapi Adya, Aa West Bengal youth who allegedly provided the “OTP bypass” technology.

The Aland vote theft case was registered in February 2023 based on a complaint by an Election Commission of India (ECI) official that the names of 5,994 voters in the Aland constituency were sought to be illegally deleted in 2022-2023 through the ECI’s online services.

The SIT alleges that Guttedar identified voters unlikely to support him and contracted a Kalaburagi data centre to delete their names at a rate of Rs 80 per request.

To bypass the ECI’s then-standard OTP security, the operators allegedly used a website called OTPbazaar, run by Bapi Adya from Nadia, West Bengal. Adya’s site reportedly linked to a US-based service that offered “OTP bypasses” for Rs 700 each, enabling the conspirators to create fake logins on the ECI’s NVSP portal.

The political row

In February 2023, Congress workers said they noticed deletion requests for residents who were still alive and living in the constituency. A subsequent verification by district officials revealed that out of 6,018 remote deletion requests, 5,994 were fraudulent.

The controversy reached the national stage on September 18, 2025, when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi highlighted the alleged breach. In response, the ECI overhauled its security, introducing Aadhaar-enabled OTP authentication to prevent similar exploits.
Guttedar, who won the Aland seat by just 697 votes in 2018, lost the 2023 election to Congress candidate B R Patil by over 10,000 votes. While Guttedar has denied all charges, the SIT claims he and his associates even attempted to destroy evidence during raids in October 2025.

SIT chargesheet and arrests

The SIT filed the chargesheet against the former BJP MLA and others under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for cheating, impersonation, criminal conspiracy and criminal breach of trust.

After the special magistrate’s court for elected representatives in Bengaluru took cognisance of the case, the accused, including the former BJP MLA who had obtained bail earlier, were summoned and appeared in court on February 24.

Sources said the special court had taken two months to take cognisance of the case due to the voluminous evidence presented by the SIT. The SIT chargesheet contained nearly 22,000 pages of supporting documents when it was presented to the first additional chief metropolitan magistrate in Bengaluru on December 12, 2025.

The supporting documents include nearly 15,000 pages of data from the ECI on IP addresses that accessed the ECI’s online services at the end of 2022 and in early 2023, the sources said.

Before the chargesheet was filed, the SIT arrested Adya, 27, from West Bengal. He was released after the magistrate’s court granted bail on December 9, 2025. A special court in Bengaluru earlier granted anticipatory bail on October 31, 2025, to Guttedar, his son Harshananda, and his personal aide, Tipperudra.

An assistant commissioner for Kalburagi and the ECI returning officer for Aland filed a police complaint at the Aland police station on February 21, 2023, against unknown persons under sections of the Indian Penal Code for impersonation, providing false information, and forgery.

According to the FIR, unknown people “used multiple mobile phones to place online applications for deletion of names of voters without the consent or knowledge of the voters”.

The SIT of the Karnataka CID, constituted on September 26, 2025, due to the slow progress of the probe since 2023, conducted searches in October 2025 on properties linked to Guttedar, 74, his two sons and others.

The searches on the MLA’s properties followed the SIT’s findings that a data centre operated by Kalaburagi resident Mohammed Ashfaq and his associate, Aslam Pasha, was used for the alleged illegal voter deletion exercise.

The SIT searches led to the recovery of multiple laptops and mobile phones, including one phone whose mobile Wi-Fi hotspot was alleged to have been used for illegal voter list manipulation during the December 2022 to February 2023 period.