Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has intensified his campaign against alleged vote theft by the poll panel and has accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of protecting the ‘destroyers of democracy’.
A month after the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha dropped the ‘atom bomb’ of alleged vote fraud by showing ‘proof’ of selective addition and deletion of voters in the Mahadevapura constituency in Karnataka during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, he has now asserted that over 6000 deletion applications in Karnataka’s Aland assembly constituency were filed by impersonators using centralised software, targeting the Congress ahead of the 2018 assembly elections.
Rahul may not have dropped the promised ‘hydrogen bomb’ as yet, but his campaign against the EC continues apace. Claiming that Dalits, OBCs, minorities and those who traditionally voted for the Opposition were targeted, he said fake logins had been created to request the deletion of voters from a few booths in Aland and the addition of voters in Rajura, Maharashtra, both Congress strongholds.
He also presented two voters who categorically denied making any such request to delete voters but were identified as the objectors. The Election Commission, not surprisingly, rejected the Congress leader’s allegations as completely baseless. It said the poll panel itself had initiated the probe into the alleged fraudulent voter deletions in Aland.
However, Rahul said the state CID, which had taken up the case, had sent 18 applications to the EC seeking clarifications, but there was no response. The EC asserted that no voter can be removed from the rolls without due process.
The poll panel’s reaction to the Congress leader’s charges has been knee-jerk so far. At a press conference held on August 17 to coincide with the INDIA bloc’s rally in Bihar against the Special Intensive Revision of rolls in Bihar, Gyanesh Kumar virtually issued an ultimatum to the Congress leader on his vote theft allegations, saying he must file an affidavit on the issue within a week or apologise to the nation.
When grave allegations are made against the Election Commission, it is duty-bound to investigate the charges and issue a point-by-point rebuttal, not resort to dramatics. Transparency must be the byword for the poll body. That the BJP came swiftly to the defence of the poll panel also does not bode well for democracy.
There have been many instances of bias by the Election Commission during elections in the last decade when it came to enforcing the model code of conduct or acting against hate speech.
Rahul Gandhi is probably hoping that the people’s court will back him, but it is important that independent India’s electoral system, which has been much admired around the world since the first elections were held in 1951-52, stands up to scrutiny.
