Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday alleged large-scale rigging in the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections, claiming it was part of a wider conspiracy to “turn a Congress landslide victory into a loss”.
At a press conference in Delhi, Gandhi said that the names of about 25 lakh fake voters had been added to the electoral rolls in Haryana ahead of the polls in October 2024.
The state has about two crore voters, which means one in every eight voters is fake, he added.
Gandhi also accused the Election Commission of helping the Bharatiya Janata Party by failing to clean up the voter rolls.
The Congress leader’s press conference came a day before the first phase of Assembly polls in Bihar.
Here are the five key takeaways from Gandhi’s allegations:
- The Congress leader displayed a photograph of a woman, whom he claimed was a Brazilian model, alleging that her image was used in voter rolls of several constituencies of Haryana. “This is a centralised operation,” he alleged. “What is a Brazilian person doing on a voters’ list in Haryana?” Gandhi also said that one voter’s name and photograph appeared 223 times in two polling booths, alleging that there were “thousands and thousands of such examples” in the state.
- Gandhi said that of the 25.4 lakh fake entries the Congress had identified in Haryana’s voter list, 5.2 lakh were duplicate voters, 93,174 had invalid addresses and 19.2 lakh were bulk voters. He added that details of the misuse of Form 6 (additions) and Form 7 (deletions) were not available with the Congress because the Election Commission had restricted access to the data after the party in August alleged voter manipulation in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in Karnataka.
- Alleging that the BJP was involved in voter list manipulation, Gandhi also played a video of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini asserting at a press conference before the election result that the Hindutva party would form the government with a full majority. “There is full vyavastha [arrangement] of it, do not worry,” Saini said in the video. Gandhi pointed to the chief minister’s remarks and said: “Please notice the smile on his face and the word vyavastha. What exactly is he talking about? When all exit polls and indicators showed that the Congress was sweeping the election, this gentleman was very sure and smiling that the BJP had some vyavastha that would reveal itself.”
- Gandhi also claimed that the system of “vote theft” had been “industrialised”, alleging that similar manipulation would take place in Bihar too. He invited residents of Bihar’s Jamui district to the stage, who said that their names had been deleted from the electoral rolls. The Congress leader alleged that, like them, several genuine voters were removed during the recent special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar.
- The Congress leader claimed that several BJP members were registered as voters in more than one state. “Thousands of BJP leaders are voting in both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana,” he alleged. “There are people who are BJP leaders in one state and voters in another.”
The Election Commission has not yet commented on Gandhi’s allegations.
Reacting to Gandhi’s remarks, BJP leader Kiren Rijiju said that raising allegations about Haryana while Bihar was voting showed that the “issue is being fabricated to divert attention”, as the Opposition “has no issue left in Bihar.”
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