Rahul Gandhi’s Bengaluru ‘vote chori’ charge: Congress worker goes to police
Police file FIR on complaint along lines of Gandhi’s allegation that more than 1 lakh votes were added in Mahadevapura Assembly seat in Bengaluru ahead of 2024 LS polls. As per rules, only EC officials can take action in voter list cases
LoP in the Lok Sabha and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi at Shakti Sthal to pay tribute to former PM Indira Gandhi on her birth anniversary, in New Delhi, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025. (PTI Photo) 
Three months after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi mentioned the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency in south east Bengaluru as among the seats that had seen “vote chori”, a Congress worker has filed a complaint alleging illegal addition of names to voter lists in the region ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
In his presentation, Gandhi had claimed that one lakh names were added to the voter lists of Mahadevapura illegally.
Congress worker Y Vinoda, 39, filed the complaint on November 19 with the Whitefield police, stating that she was deeply pained by recent allegations that names of fake voters were added to the Mahadevapura voter list by “unknown officials and private persons”.
Police have registered an FIR on charges of breach of trust and forgery, along with under Section 129 of the Representation of the People Act, which says election officials will not do anything that could favour a candidate.
However, it is doubtful if the FIR stands as only Election Commission officials can file complaints over voter lists.
In her complaint, Vinoda has alleged: “According to information available in the public domain, huge numbers of fake voter names were added to the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency voter lists – which is part of the Bangalore Central parliamentary seat – ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. This was done to manipulate the poll verdict of the people in the region.”
The president of the Congress’s women unit for the Bangalore Central constituency, Vinoda has sought “a thorough and unbiased investigation”, adding:
“The addition of large numbers of fake voters could not have happened without a nexus between officials, a political party and private persons.”
Incidentally, Vinoda was made the Congress block president for the Marathahalli region in the Mahadevapura constituency a day after police registered the FIR on her complaint. As per photos shared on social media, she received the block president ID from H Nagesh and Mansoor Ali Khan, the losing Congress candidates in the 2023 Assembly poll and the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, respectively.
A local Booth Level Officer in Mahadevapura had incidentally filed a police complaint in 2022 over alleged attempt to manipulate the voter lists by a private agency, Chilume Trust, contracted by the city municipal corporation (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike), for gathering voter data in the Mahadevapura constituency and two other seats. The case is still pending in courts.
In the Aland constituency in the Kalaburagi region of Karnataka where an illegal vote deletion racket was highlighted by local Congress candidate B R Patil in 2023 – also spotlighted by Gandhi – the local police had registered an FIR on the basis of a complaint by an election officer, after the EC found the allegation to be true.
In 2022 and 2023, when the allegation of attempts to manipulate the Mahadevapura and Aland voter list first arose, the BJP was in power in Karnataka, But in 2024, when the voter list is alleged to have been tampered with, the Congress was in power in Karnataka.
Gandhi had alleged that the BJP had added 1 lakh votes illegally in Mahadevapura ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to win the Bangalore Central seat. Of them, he claimed, 11,965 were fake voters, 40,009 were voters with fake addresses, and 10,452 were voters at several addresses in the constituency.
BJP leader Aravind Limbavalli, who has controlled the Mahadevapura Assembly reserved constituency for more than 15 years, had called the allegations “invalid, baseless” and “immature”. He had also pointed to the huge influx and exit of migrant voters in Mahadevapura since the seat was created in 2008, resulting in a trebling of the number of voters from 2.75 lakh in 2008 to 6.80 lakh at present.
The Indian Express had visited the three addresses mentioned by Gandhi in Mahadevapura, and found that each corresponded with spaces where a large number of migrants live or work. However, none of the 194 people whom Gandhi mentioned as staying at these addresses with names in the electoral rolls now lives there, the caretakers or managers told The Express.
While the Congress allegations seemed to stem from the fact that the BJP’s winning MP from Bangalore Central, P C Mohan, had a 1.14-lakh lead in Mahadevapura in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, offsetting vote losses in other Assembly segments of the constituency, the BJP has won both the Mahadevapura Assembly and Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat on all four occasions since the new Mahadevapura constituency was created in 2008.
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