‘We will come looking for you’: In Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi says law pertaining to EC will be changed retrospectively

“Finally, why was the rule with regards to CCTV and the data they contain changed? Why was it allowed for the EC to destroy the footage after 45 days (of the results)?” Gandhi wondered, referring to a new rule that was brought out on May 30, 2025.

Electoral reforms are “very simple”, he said, but charged that the government did not want them. Gandhi offered his prescription: “One, give the whole voters’ list to all parties one month before the election. Two, don’t destroy CCTV footage. Third, give us access to EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) to see what their architecture is. Four, don’t allow the EC to get away with everything.”

‘Vote theft, the biggest anti-national act’

Accusing the ECI of “colluding with those in power to shape the elections,” Gandhi asserted that election campaigns were being tailored as per the requirements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and were sometimes months long. “We have a Brazilian who appears 22 times on the electoral rolls of Haryana. There is one woman in Haryana whose name appeared 200 times. The election of Haryana was stolen,” he said.

He complained that the EC had not told him why lakhs of duplicate voters existed, and why there were 1.2 lakh duplicate voters in Bihar if they had cleaned up the electoral rolls.

The biggest “anti-national act”, he said, was the stealing of votes. “When you destroy the vote, you destroy the fabric of this country. Vote chori is an anti-national act, and those across the aisle committed an anti-national act,” he alleged.

‘RSS trying to capture every institution’

Gandhi drew protests from the Treasury benches when he said that the Indian nation was a fabric with countless individual threads – each being equal as Mahatma Gandhi wanted – and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was trying to destroy it by capturing every institution.

Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said the Treasury benches had set away crucial time for discussing electoral reforms and wanted to hear what was being said, but Gandhi was wasting time by not coming to the issue. Amid Opposition protests, Speaker Om Birla said decorum should be maintained, and the Chair must not be challenged.

Gandhi replied that the discussion was about “votes”, “the stealing of votes”, and SIR. “And I will come to the ECI. Universities, CBI, ED, all have been captured. Bureaucrats who support the ideology of the RSS are placed in them,” he said.

Earlier, he said, “All our institutions have emerged from the vote. So, it is always that the RSS has to capture every institution. The next project after Gandhi-ji’s assassination is to capture all institutions. My friends don’t like the connections I am making. After the father of the nation was assassinated, his vision of an equal India had to be destroyed. Everybody knows how VCs (Vice-Chancellors) are placed in Indian universities today.”