Rahul now alleges poll fraud in Hry; EC rebuts
Rahul Gandhi accused the Election Commission and BJP of manipulating Haryana elections, alleging 2.5 million fraudulent votes to benefit BJP.
Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of conspiring to “steal” the Congress’s mandate in the Haryana elections last year, alleging large-scale manipulation of electoral rolls and irregularities in the counting process.
Speaking a day before the first phase of the Bihar polls, Gandhi said his party collected proof that nearly 2.5 million votes in Haryana were either deleted or duplicated to benefit the BJP. This allegedly included a Brazilian model whose photograph was used 22 times in 10 booths in the Rai assembly constituency using names such as “Seema, Sweety and Saraswati”, Gandhi said.
“This is being done in a systematic way, not randomly. The Election Commission has become a participant rather than a neutral referee,” he said.
Gandhi also touched upon the controversial special intensive revision of rolls in Bihar and brought on stage five people who said they were voters from Jamui district whose names were removed.
ECI dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as “unfounded,” saying that no appeals or objections were filed during the Haryana electoral process. “Haryana: zero appeals against electoral rolls,” said an ECI statement, adding that only 22 election petitions were pending in the high court across 90 assembly seats.
The BJP dismissed the allegation as “false and baseless” and accused the Congress leader of raising questions on ECI to hide his failures and defame democracy. “If there is any irregularity with the voting, then one must flag it with the EC or approach the court. But he never does it,” said Union minister Kiren Rijiju.
The Congress exceeded expectations in Haryana during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, winning five of the 10 parliamentary seats in a state where the BJP has been in power since 2014. But in assembly polls held just months later, the party slumped to a shock loss, undone by infighting, a listless campaign and botched caste dynamics.
This is the third presentation made by Gandhi on so-called vote theft. In August, Gandhi alleged that there were 100,250 “stolen” votes in the Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bangalore (Central) parliamentary constituency that helped the BJP win the seat in 2024, accusing ECI of “colluding” with the ruling party.
Then, in September, he said that there were attempts to delete the names of 6,018 voters in Karnataka’s Aland constituency in December 2022 and add the names of 6,850 “fake voters” in Maharashtra’s Rajura constituency in 2024, alleging that chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar was shielding the people behind these attempts.
In both cases, ECI dismissed the allegations and the BJP called them attempts to distract from the Congress’s dismal poll performance.
On Wednesday, Gandhi said the Congress had compiled what he termed the “H-Files” — a set of data and evidence that, according to him, showed how the results in Haryana were “reversed.”
“We suspected this was not happening in just a few constituencies but across the state and perhaps nationally,” he said, claiming that irregularities were reported by candidates in almost every seat.
The Congress won 37 seats to the BJP’s 48 in the 2024 Haryana elections, and the vote share difference between the two parties was less than one percentage point.
“One in eight voters in Haryana are fake and despite that the Congress lost by 22,779 votes which was the difference in eight seats,” Gandhi said. “The big picture is that 22,000 is the margin and 25 lakh is this... You can understand that there was no election in Haryana. There was a theft (of elections) in Haryana and it is very clear who is responsible for the theft.”
He accused ECI of refusing to ensure transparency and destroying democracy “in partnership with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah” .
“The message is that Gen Z and youth have the power to restore our democracy with satya and ahimsa. Peacefully, but by expressing their desire for a democratic India, by fighting for a democratic India and by resisting this wholesale theft of democracy and murder of the Constitution and democracy,” he said.
The Congress leader alleged that the discrepancies in the electoral rolls fell under several categories — duplicate entries, invalid or false addresses, bulk registrations, and unexplained voter additions. He said about 2.5 million voters were unaccounted for in the official rolls and accused ECI of failing to act despite having software capable of detecting duplicates.
Gandhi alleged that ECI “ignored” repeated requests from the Congress to run the software to identify voters with the same names, photographs or addresses. “The system exists to catch duplicates,” he said, “but it is not being used because it would expose what has been done.”
According to Gandhi, the alleged manipulation extended to postal ballots, which he said diverged unusually from the results of votes cast through EVMs. “For the first time in Haryana’s history, postal ballot tallies were different from the actual votes,” he said, suggesting that these disparities were signs of tampering. Of the 80,105 postal ballots cast in Haryana assembly elections, 41,417 went to the Congress and 27,952 to the BJP.
Gandhi spoke about a woman who, he claimed, was a Brazilian model whose photograph was used for fraudulent votes under various names. “This is the kind of absurdity we found,” he said, adding that such examples were meant to show the “scale of the problem.”
He alleged that thousands of BJP workers had voted in both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, taking advantage of duplicate registrations. He questioned ECI’s explanation for voters listed with “house number zero” in their addresses.
In August, CEC Kumar had clarified that such entries represented citizens whose homes lacked official numbering or those who were homeless.
But Gandhi said his team physically verified several of these addresses and found that many voters living in “house number zero” were in fact residents of identifiable homes and villages. “We found that the use of house number zero makes the person untraceable. Once the vote is cast, you cannot identify who it belongs to,” he said.
He even played a video and pointed towards election commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu. “Look nobody else is convinced, look at the Sardar ji he is looking like ye [Gyanesh Kumar] toh jhooth bol raha hai [he is lying],” he added.
Pointing to Bihar, Gandhi invited five people who said they were voters in Jamui district. One of them, a man in a wheelchair, said his name was deleted on the grounds that he was “absent.” Gandhi said such deletions were not isolated and that the same “system” used in Haryana was being “industrialised” and would be deployed in Bihar. “You can ask me why we didn’t detect this in Bihar. That’s because the voters list comes to us at the last minute,” he said.
Gandhi said over 350,000 voters were deleted from Haryana’s electoral rolls without due notice, many of them allegedly from communities that traditionally voted for the Congress.
ECI officials pointed out that the Congress’s polling and booth-level agents didn’t raise any objections during voting or counting. “What were the polling agents of INC doing in the polling stations? They are supposed to object if the elector has already voted or if the polling agents doubt the identity of the elector,” officials said.
When asked about this, Gandhi said the integrity of voter lists was not the responsibility of political parties. “It is not my problem if the voter list is wrong. It is the EC who has to guarantee voter list integrity,” he said. He added that the Commission often tried to “shift the burden” onto political parties. “If you want us to solve the problem, give us the entire database and we will solve it. But they don’t do it,” he said.
ECI officials also questioned Gandhi’s stand on the SIR process, asking whether he supported or opposed an exercise that removes duplicate, dead, or shifted voters and verifies citizenship. “Is Rahul Gandhi supporting SIR which removes duplicate, dead and shifted voters along with verification of citizenship, or is he opposing it?” officials asked.
