NEW DELHI (Nov 5): Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday levelled explosive allegations against the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the BJP government, claiming that 25 lakh fake voters were included in the Haryana electoral rolls ahead of the 2024 Assembly elections — which the BJP went on to win.
Addressing his third press conference under the “Vote Chori” (vote theft) campaign, Gandhi said the Congress had uncovered “massive voter list manipulation” and accused the BJP of running an organised operation to “steal democracy.”
Presenting what he called the “H Files” — referring to Haryana — Gandhi alleged that photographs of a Brazilian model were used 22 times under different names across 10 polling booths in the Rai constituency. “One in eight voters in Haryana are fake,” he said, claiming that 1,24,177 voter photos were found duplicated and Operation Sarkar Chori was launched to keep Congress out of power.
“The Election Commission of India is in partnership with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to destroy Indian democracy,” Gandhi alleged. “If the voter list is a lie, there is no democracy.”
He said the Congress had identified 5.21 lakh duplicate voters, 93,174 invalid addresses, and 19.26 lakh bulk voters in Haryana. Showing specific examples, he claimed one address in Hodal had 501 registered voters, while 223 voters across two booths shared identical photographs.
Gandhi also cited a discrepancy in postal ballots, claiming Congress received 73 seats in postal votes while the BJP secured only 17 — yet the final result was reversed.
Playing a clip of Haryana Chief Minister Naib Singh Saini saying the BJP had “all the vyavasta (arrangements)” to win, Gandhi called it “an open admission of pre-rigging.”
He dismissed the Election Commission’s explanation that “house number 0” in voter lists referred to homeless individuals, saying, “We checked physically. The so-called house number 0 was actually a two-storey building.”
Gandhi accused the ECI of bias and called on India’s youth and Gen Z voters to “reclaim democracy through satya and ahimsa.” “This democracy belongs to you, not to the ECI or Narendra Modi,” he said.
The BJP and the Election Commission swiftly rejected the allegations. In a statement, the ECI said Gandhi’s claims were “baseless, incorrect, and misleading,” adding that no voter can be deleted without due process.
The BJP called Gandhi’s charges “a desperate attempt to delegitimise democratic institutions after repeated electoral defeats.”
The Congress has now claimed that the same “vote theft system” could be deployed in the Bihar elections, whose first phase begins Thursday. “You may ask why we didn’t detect it earlier — the answer is that the voters’ list reaches us at the last minute,” Gandhi said.
In August, Gandhi had made similar accusations in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura constituency, claiming over one lakh votes were “stolen,” which the ECI also denied.