New Delhi, August 18: India’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar on Sunday issued a sharp warning to Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, asking him to either file a sworn affidavit backing his allegations of “vote theft” within seven days or publicly apologise.
The warning came hours after Gandhi, leader of the Congress party, launched his “Voter Adhikar Yatra” (Voter Rights March) in Bihar. Gandhi had earlier accused the Election Commission of allowing widespread discrepancies in electoral rolls, citing a six-month Congress study of voter lists in Bengaluru that allegedly uncovered nearly 100,000 fake entries.
Without directly naming Gandhi, Kumar dismissed the claims, saying they lacked legal basis and evidence. “Either give an affidavit or apologise to the nation — there is no third option. If no affidavit is received in seven days, these allegations will be deemed baseless,” Kumar said at his first press conference since taking office in February.
He argued that conflating duplicate names in electoral rolls with multiple voting amounted to labelling ordinary electors as criminals. “What else is this, if not an insult to the Constitution of India,” he asked.
The row comes as Bihar undergoes a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls ahead of state elections due later this year. The revision, ordered in June and now challenged in India’s Supreme Court, requires all 78.9 million registered voters to re-submit documents, with a final voter list due on September 30.
The CEC defended the timing of the exercise despite ongoing monsoon floods, noting that similar intensive revisions had been conducted in the same season in 2003.
Gandhi’s allegations of “vote theft” have resonated across India’s opposition but drawn sharp rebuke from the Election Commission, which accuses political leaders of “misleading the public” and “targeting voters for political ends.”