Karnataka appoints special counsel in bid to revive probe into 2022 ‘illegal voter data collection’ cases

Two First Information Reports (FIRs) were registered by the Bengaluru police in 2022 over allegations by ECI officials that a private group called the Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Trust was illegally collecting voters’ data in the Mahadevapura constituency and other parts of Bengaluru under the ECI’s Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) programme.

Ahead of the 2023 state Assembly polls, the Congress had alleged in 2022 that the Chilume Group was linked to BJP leaders in Bengaluru and the firm was awarded the voter data collection and awareness work as part of an exercise to manipulate voter lists through deletions and additions.

Investigations into two FIRs registered at Halsurgate and Kadugodi in the Mahadevapura region at the instance of the ECI were, however, halted in December 2022 after the Karnataka High Court imposed an interim stay on the probe into alleged illegal voter data collection, following petitions by arrested electoral registration officers and officials of the Chilume Trust.

The appointment of the special counsel came in the wake of allegations of “vote chori” made by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in August 2025 regarding the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency in Bengaluru and in September 2025 regarding the Aland Assembly constituency in the Kalaburagi district.

The government order of November 27, 2025, states that the special counsel will contest the case against Chilume Trust on behalf of the Bengaluru police, which was investigating the allegations of illegal data collection made by the ECI before the probe was stalled.

The move to appoint the special counsel is part of efforts to take the investigation to its conclusion, government sources said.

Allegations against Chilume Trust, arrests

In the illegal voter data collection cases of 2022, officials of the Chilume Trust are alleged to have connived with Bengaluru city officials to create fake identity cards of booth-level officers of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to go from house to house to collect voter data under the guise of carrying voter awareness work for the ECI.

The charges of voter data theft in Mahadevapura emerged in September 2022 after a local NGO raised concerns over the ‘Chilume Group’ enlisting private workers and passing them off as civic officials to carry out the ECI’s SVEEP programme for the registration of voters, and linking of voter IDs to Aadhaar numbers through the poll panel’s Garuda App.

The police arrested 10 people in the case, including the director of Chilume Enterprises Ravikumar Krishnappa, and three others from the firm, besides four BBMP revenue officials for facilitating the alleged fraud. All the accused were later released.

The ECI also directed the then regional commissioner for Bengaluru, Amlan Aditya Biswas, to hold an administrative inquiry regarding the “complaint of misuse of voter registration awareness activities and alleged data capture by the private entity in BBMP area.”

The inquiry report noted that “no electoral fraud or manipulation of electoral roll” were detected in the three constituencies – Shivajinagar, Chickpet and Mahadevpura – and that there was “no evidence of any intrusion into or tampering of data” on ERO.net or in the operation of the Garuda App of the Election Commission.

The probe found that the BBMP allowed Chilume Group to “illegally collect voter data on an unauthorised private Digital Application (Digital Sameeksha) and storage of the same in a foreign server, thereby creating wilfully, opportunities for wrongful gain from personal data.”

Congress worker’s complaint in November 2025

Ahead of the recent appointment of the special counsel, a Congress worker in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency also filed a complaint in November 2025 alleging illegal addition of names to voters’ lists in the region prior to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

The Mahadevapura constituency had featured in one of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s presentations on alleged vote theft in August 2025 where he claimed that 1 lakh votes were added to the voter lists of Mahadevapura illegally.

The Congress worker, Y Vinoda, 39, filed the complaint on November 19 with the Whitefield police where she stated that she was deeply pained by the emergence of recent allegations that names of fake voters were added to the Mahadevapura voter list by “unknown officials and private persons”. Questions have, however, been raised over the validity of the FIR filed in this regard since only the Election Commission and its officials are authorised to file complaints over voter list frauds after conducting verification of allegations of manipulation of voter lists.

After similar allegations in Aland constituency, the local police registered an FIR on the basis of a complaint by an election officer after the EC found the allegation of attempts for illegal deletion of 5,994 voters in the region to be true. A Special Investigation Team of the Karnataka Crime Investigation Department (CID) filed a chargesheet on December 19, 2025, against former BJP MLA Subhash Guttedar, his son Harshananda and others.

The Congress candidate from Aland in the 2023 state polls, B R Patil, who managed to avert the illegal deletion of voters after he was alerted by party workers, won the 2023 Aland poll by a margin of 10,348 votes against Subhash Guttedar of the BJP who had won the seat previously in 2018 by a narrow margin of 697 votes.