Following allegations of ‘vote theft’ by Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, the issue is gaining momentum. Rahul Gandhi has called it a crime against the constitution. Supporting this claim, Mallikarjun Kharge stated that it is time to protect democracy, the constitution, and the country. The BJP has called it illogical. Former Union Minister Shashi Tharoor, who has shown a dissenting stance recently, has also demanded action from the Election Commission regarding this.
Shashi Tharoor, a senior Congress leader and former Union Minister, has been taking a dissenting stance against the party for some time. He was expressing his views outside the party line. However, he supported Rahul Gandhi’s allegations regarding the Election Commission and vote theft, calling it a serious issue. In his post on the social media platform X, he said, “These are serious questions which must be seriously addressed in the interests of all parties & all voters. Our democracy is too precious to allow its credibility to be destroyed by incompetence, carelessness or worse, deliberate tampering.” He added that the Election Commission must urgently act and keep the country informed.
Earlier, Rahul Gandhi, the former President of the Congress, presented figures from a Karnataka assembly constituency, making a sensational claim that this model of ‘vote theft’ has been implemented in several constituencies to benefit the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He claimed that this was being done in collusion between the BJP and the Election Commission and is a crime against the constitution.
During this, he presented the data of the voter list of the Mahadevapura assembly constituency in Karnataka and cited the irregularities there. He said that it took 6 months to collect evidence related to election rigging. The Election Commission is also not providing machine-readable data of the voter list so that all this cannot be caught.
Rahul Gandhi said that his team studied the data of the Mahadevapura assembly constituency of the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha seat in Karnataka and found this conspiracy there. He claimed that the BJP lagged behind in 6 out of 7 assembly constituencies of the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha seat, while it received a one-sided vote in Mahadevapura and achieved a big victory.
The Congress leader claimed that 1,00,250 votes were stolen in the Mahadevapura assembly constituency of Karnataka, and the seat was won by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by a margin of 32,707 votes. He said, “Investigation in the Mahadevapura area revealed that 1,00,250 votes were stolen there, including 11,965 duplicate voters, while 40,009 fake addresses were used. Apart from this, 10,452 voters were registered at the same address, while 4,132 voters were added to the list with fake photos. 33,692 new voters were added using the wrong use of Form-6.” He mentioned a voter named Aditya Srivastava in his example, who has votes at four different places.