New Delhi: In a revealing Press conference, Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi on Thursday alleged massive electoral fraud in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment of Karnataka’s Bangalore Central constituency during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and stated that this was happening across the country too.
Backed by data collected over six months by a team of over 30-40 people, the senior Congress MP accused the Election Commission (EC) of colluding with the BJP to manipulate voter rolls, suppress scrutiny, and enable voter theft on a significant scale.
According to LoP Gandhi, the Congress received 6,26,208 votes in Bangalore Central, while the BJP secured 6,58,915 votes — a margin of 32,707.
However, a deeper examination of the Mahadevapura Assembly segment, a part of this Lok Sabha seat, revealed a massive discrepancy. Here, BJP polled 2,29,632 votes while the Congress managed only 1,15,586 — a staggering gap of 1,14,046 votes.
LoP Gandhi claimed that at least 1,00,250 votes were stolen in this single Assembly segment alone and the same was being done across the country.
“First, duplicate voters. As many as 11,965 entries were found to be duplicated across multiple booths and even states. Names like Gurkirat Singh and Aditya Shrivastava appeared multiple times and in the case of Shrivastava, his name appeared in different states — Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh,” said LoP Gandhi.
“Second, fake or invalid addresses where 40,009 voter entries listed addresses that did not exist or were clearly fake (e.g., house number “0”, symbols like “-” or “#”).
“We found thousands of such cases and interestingly, in some cases, we found voters’ father’s name mentioned as ‘dfojhaidf’… There are similar such cases as well and it tells us why the EC is hesitating to give us the data,” he said.
Dwelling on the issue of mass voters at a single address, he said, “Certain addresses like House No. 35 had 80 registered voters in a single-room dwelling. Another address — a brewery — had 68 voters registered, raising serious questions about legitimacy.”
“When our people went there to check and cross-verify, we found that in much of such addresses, where dozens of people are allegedly living, were a single-story apartment. When we went there, we were threatened and, in some places, we were told that no such individual lived there,” he said.
LoP Gandhi also talked about the 4,132 invalid entries that had either missing photos or photos so small or unclear that identification was impossible and the misuse of Form 6 by 33,629 voters.
LoP Gandhi emphasised that this is why the poll panel refuses to provide soft copies of voter rolls or allow proper audit of data. He also alleged the destruction of CCTV footage to eliminate evidence of wrongdoing.
“This isn’t just a local issue. What happened in Mahadevapura is happening across India,” LoP Gandhi said.
“PM Modi needed to win only 25 seats to stay in power. BJP won 25 seats with margins under 33,000. That’s why the EC is hiding the data — it’s protecting a crime, not democracy,” he alleged.
(IANS)
