Aland ‘vote chori’ case: SIT files chargesheet, names ex-Karnataka BJP MLA among others
Chargesheet has 20,000-plus pages of documents, most of them comprising data provided by EC on IP addresses which were used to make illegal applications for deletion of voter names
Former BJP MLA of Aland constituency, Subhash Guttedar. (File Photo) 
A Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Karnataka Police has named seven persons, including a former BJP MLA, in a chargesheet filed on Friday in connection with the ‘vote chori’ case in which names of 5,994 voters in the Aland Assembly constituency were sought to be illegally deleted in 2022-23.
Those named in the chargesheet include Subhash Guttedar, a former four-time MLA from Aland; his son Harshanand Guttedar; his personal secretary Tipperudra; three operators of a data centre in Kalaburagi, Akram Pasha, Mukaram Pasha and Mohammed Ashfaq; and a youth from West Bengal, Bapi Adya, who is alleged to have provided an ‘OTP bypass’ facility to access the Election Commission’s online services.
The chargesheet has been filed under Sections dealing with cheating, impersonation, criminal conspiracy and criminal breach of trust, which entail imprisonment of 10 years to life.
The chargesheet, submitted to the First Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate in Bengaluru, has nearly 22,000 pages of supporting documents. Of these, nearly 15,000 pages comprise data provided by the EC regarding the IP addresses used to access its online services to apply for the deletion of names, as per sources.
The magistrate’s court initially indicated that the chargesheet should be filed in the court designated for elected representatives, but later accepted it.
Bapi Adya, who was the first arrest made in the case, ran a website called OTPbazaar which allegedly linked up with a US-based site called SMSAlert to provide OTP bypass services to the Kalaburagi data centre, which is believed to have been used to access the EC online services. Adya was released on bail on Tuesday.
On October 31, a special court for elected representatives in Bengaluru had granted anticipatory bail to Guttedar, Harshananda and Tipperudra.
Police sources said that the OTP bypass service provided by Adya had over 10 lakh users, but the purpose for which they used the same cannot be determined. However, sources said other election candidates may have also used the service to access the EC website, and that it was through them that Guttedar allegedly came to know of it.
The Aland attempt to delete voter names was one of the ‘vote chori’ cases highlighted by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. After he did so on September 18, the EC introduced an Aadhaar-enabled OTP authentication system to access its online services for voter deletions, additions and changes.
The previous EC registration system, purely based on OTPs sent to the registering phone number, was in operation for nearly two years and was easy to manipulate – as shown in the Aland case.
Guttedar, 74, a two-term BJP MLA from Aland, his son who is a zilla panchayat-level leader, and Tipperudra are alleged to have contracted the Kalaburagi data centre operated by locals Akram Pasha and Mohammed Ashfaq to put in applications for deletion of voter names.
As per the SIT, ₹80 was paid per deletion to the data entry operators at the data centre. Adya, who was arrested by the SIT from Nadia district in West Bengal, was allegedly paid ₹10 for each OTP bypass provided.
It was the trail of payments which led to the arrest of Adya on November 13. The SIT probe found that ₹700 was credited to him from the account of one of the data centre operators in Kalaburagi for every ‘OTP bypass’ provided. A crypto wallet allegedly operated by Adya and seized by the SIT was found to contain only around ₹10,000.
The illegal applications were exposed in February 2023 after Congress workers in Aland came to know about the same, and insisted on verification of the deletion requests. A ground-level verification then showed that 6,018 names had been sought to be deleted through remote applications across the 254 election booths in Aland. Of these 6,018, only 24 were no longer found to be living in Aland, while 5,994 were still residents.
Days before the state Assembly elections, the Kalaburagi Assistant Commissioner filed a police complaint against unknown persons. The Congress government that came to power set up the SIT, following Gandhi’s ‘vote chori’ press conference, citing the slow progress of the 2023 probe.
The SIT probe has found that 72 phone numbers were used to generate OTPs to access EC services, and then to place requests for deletion of hundreds of names from the Aland voter list. The 72 phone numbers belonged to individuals located in 17 states, and they were unaware of their phone numbers being used, as per the SIT.
Guttedar, who has won from Aland twice each on Congress and BJP tickets, has denied any links to the illegal voter deletion attempt. In the elections that followed the foiling of the bid, he contested from Aland on the BJP ticket and was defeated by Congress candidate B R Patil by 10,348 votes.
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