Stepping up his attack on the Election Commission (EC), Leader of the Opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused the poll body and the BJP of perpetrating “a huge criminal fraud” in elections. To back his accusation, Gandhi released what he called findings of an investigation the Congress had carried out in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency that is part of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency in Karnataka.
In a presentation to the media at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters, Gandhi said the Congress won all the Assembly segments in Bangalore Central except Mahadevpura and lost the election by 1,14,046 votes.
“So we started looking at this number. Why is it that this (1,14,046) comes out of one seat? It is a huge imbalance. So we started looking at Mahadevapura, the details. And we found that 1,00,250 votes were stolen. Out of 6.5 lakh total votes in the Assembly, 1,00,250 votes were stolen in five different ways,” he alleged.
“They were stolen in five different ways: duplicate voters, fake and invalid addresses, bulk voters in a single address, invalid photos, and misuse of Form 6, which is given to first-time voters for enrolment,” Gandhi said.
The LoP said the Congress analysis revealed 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters with the same address, 4,132 invalid photos, and 33,692 instances of Form 6 misuse.
Gandhi alleged there were instances of one person appearing in “four polling booths” and voting in multiple booths. “There are thousands of such voters who have voted multiple times in different states. A total of 11,965 votes have been stolen like this,” the LoP said, showing voter lists with the photograph of a person whom he identified as Gurkirat Singh Dang. Gandhi claimed Dang’s name figured in voter lists in four different polling booths in Mahadevpura.
Gandhi then showed voter lists with the photograph of a person whom he identified as Adtiya Srivastava, and claimed the person in question was enrolled as a voter in two polling booths in Karnataka and one each in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. “… Same name, the same address, the same person in four different polling booths. And this is not just one person, this is thousands of people in one Assembly,” he said.
Invalid address, bulk voters
Gandhi said 40,009 voters either had no address or an invalid address and columns such as father’s name either had fake details or gibberish. “These are of three types: either an address that doesn’t exist, or the house number is zero, or the address can’t be verified. They have fake details in columns such as father’s name, etc … Father’s name in one case ‘ilsdfhug’, in another ‘dfoigoidf’.”
Giving details of “bulk voters” with the same address, he showed a photograph. “This is House no 35 … There is a single-room house where 80 voters are shown living: different names, different families. We sent people to check, and they got beaten up. And then there is another one … 46 voters all from different families living in a single bedroom house, and when we go there, they don’t exist. There were 40,009 such voters in the constituency.”
The LoP showed the photograph of what he said was a brewery whose address, he alleged, was cited by 68 voters. “This is a commercial establishment. Nobody lives there. When we go and ask them, where are these people, who are these people, nothing, never heard of them.”
About the alleged misuse of Form 6, Gandhi said, “There is a lady called Shakun Rani, a 70-year-old, who got registered as a new voter twice. She has been registered twice in two months. And she votes twice in two different booths … She actually votes twice, or somebody votes twice for her … There are 33,692 such voters. I have got a list of the ages. They are supposed to be new voters, but they are all old.”
‘There is a pattern’
The Congress leader alleged this manipulation did not happen in just one Assembly segment. “We have studied the pattern. We are convinced this crime is being done at a huge scale across the country in state after state after state,” Gandhi said, adding that this was why exit polls and internal surveys of parties “go massively wrong”.
“Not giving machine-readable voter lists and disallowing CCTV footage by changing the law convinced us that the EC colluded with the BJP to steal elections,” he alleged. He also accused the EC of looking to “destroy” evidence of “vote theft” across the country.
Gandhi pointed out that the difference between the BJP and Congress in the Haryana Assembly polls last year was 22,779 votes. “We have identified a pattern in the country that the BJP is sweeping one or two seats … while there is a sweep in some seats, the rest are seeing natural competition,” he said.
The LoP claimed that Narendra Modi had become the PM because of 25 seats. “The EC is not giving us data. This is criminal evidence. The EC is destroying evidence in the country… You can keep data on a hard disk for years, but they are destroying evidence. They (EC) are colluding with the BJP and destroying the election system.”
The Congress leader urged the judiciary to intervene and also cautioned the EC. “One day, the Opposition is going to come to power and you will see what we do to you. Because you are attacking the foundation of what our founding fathers built and we are not going to allow you, no matter who you are,” he said.
Responding to the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO) letter asking him to sign a declaration along with the names of ineligible electors included in the electoral rolls and eligible voters who have been excluded, Gandhi said. “I am a politician and what I say to the people is my word. I am saying this publicly to everybody. Take it as an oath. This is Election Commission data. They haven’t denied the information. They are saying, ‘Will you do it under oath?’ Why don’t you say the data is wrong? Because they know the truth and we know that you have done this across the country.”
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addressed press conference in Indira Bhawan, New Delhi 
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