A day before the crucial Bihar Assembly polls, Congress on Wednesday dropped the much-awaited “H-bomb,” with Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi alleging massive vote fraud in the Haryana Assembly polls last year. Rahul alleged that 25 lakh votes were stolen in Haryana, which has a total of two crore voters. “This means one in eight voters in Haryana are fake, 12.5 per cent,” Rahul said at a press conference in the party’s headquarters in the national capital.
The Congress leader claimed that a “systematic vote chori ” method, evolved by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Election Commission of India to “kill Indian democracy,” will be deployed in the Bihar Assembly polls as well.
Citing an example, the Gandhi scion shared 22 entries in the Haryana voter list with a woman’s photograph. “This is a photograph of a Brazilian model. The photograph can be downloaded for free from a website that deals in stock photos. This photo appears 22 times in the voter list under different names: Sweety, Seema, Saraswati. She votes in 10 different booths in Haryana, and she has multiple names. This means this is a centralised operation,” Rahul said in his press conference, which was during the day touted as the party’s Hydrogen Bomb, which the former Congress president often claimed.
Rahul put up a presentation to back his claim that the Haryana Assembly polls last year were “stolen.”
“It is very clear who is responsible for the vote theft. (Pointing to a picture of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the two election commissioners. These gentlemen colluded with the BJP to ensure that the Congress could not win the election in Haryana. The ECI is in a partnership with the PM and the Home Minister, and they have destroyed the democratic foundations of this country,” Rahul alleged.
“It is pretty clear to us that now this is a system, this is something that has now been industrialised, and it can be used in any state, and it is going to be used in Bihar. I am confident that after the Bihar elections, we will get the same records, and we will show you that the same thing has happened in the poll-bound state which votes on November 6 and 11,” Rahul said.
Earlier in September, Rahul had accused CEC Kumar of protecting those who “destroyed democracy” and cited data from the Assembly constituency in Karnataka to claim that the votes of Congress supporters were being systematically deleted ahead of elections. In August, Rahul, citing data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, had claimed that over one lakh votes were “stolen” through manipulation in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in Karnataka. Congress has also claimed that the Maharashtra Assembly polls too were rigged in a similar fashion, and some of the cases are sub judice.
Rahul claimed that thousands of people associated with the BJP voted both in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. “Sarkar Chori has destroyed India’s democracy, and the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) issue is the latest weapon. Every single opposition party understands this; they can see this. If the voter list is a lie, there is no democracy. My role as an opposition leader is to let you know the real world that you are living in,” he said.
Asked about moving the courts, Rahul said, “The Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, is watching... It is not hidden.”
During the presentation, Rahul also played out a video of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini saying two days before counting that the BJP would win and also making this statement -- “We have a system in place.”