New Delhi: Congress MP and Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Thursday once again launched a scathing attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI). Doubling down his "vote chori" allegations against the ECI and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), during a press conference titled 'The Aland Files', Gandhi alleged deletion of 6,018 votes in Karnataka's Aland assembly constituency in 2023.
Without mentioning the BJP, the Congress MP said that the poll body is protecting "murderers of democracy".
Gandhi started the special press conference by saying, "First of all, this is not the H-bomb, the H-bomb is coming. This is another milestone in setting up and demonstrating to the youth of this country how elections are being rigged."
During the press briefing, the Congress MP alleged that "somebody" tried to delete 6,018 votes in Karnataka's Aland constituency in Karnataka in 2023. He claimed that the deletion of votes was done in centralised manner using software and not through individuals.
"Aland is a constituency in Karnataka. Somebody tried to delete 6018 votes. We don't know the total number of votes that were deleted in Aland in the 2023 election. They are much higher than 6,018, but somebody got caught deleting those 6018 votes, and it was caught by coincidence," Gandhi stated.
Explaining how the person who deleted votes was caught, the Congress leader said, "What happened was that the booth-level officer there noted that her uncle's vote was deleted, so she checked who deleted her uncle's vote, and she found that it was a neighbour who deleted the vote. She asked her neighbour, but they said I did not delete any votes. Neither the person deleting the vote nor the person whose vote was deleted knew. Some other force hijacked the process and deleted the vote."
Hitting out at Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyaneshwar Kumar, Gandhi stated that the CEC is defending 'murderers' of democracy by not providing details of voter deletions.
Rahul Gandhi's Full Press Conference:
Gandhi alleged that in Aland, 6018 applications were filed impersonating voters. "The people who filed these applications actually never filed them. The filing was done automatically using software. Mobile numbers from outside Karnataka, from different states, were used to delete numbers in Aland, and it was done targeting Congress voters," he said.
"Let's talk about how this is being done and why I'm saying and we are saying that this is being done in a centralised manner, and this is being done not using individuals but using software. Look at the serial numbers... A software is picking up the first name in the booth and using it to delete votes," The Congress MP added.
"Someone ran an automated program to ensure that the first voter at the booth was the applicant. That same person got cell phones from outside the state, used them to file the application, and we are pretty certain that this was done in a centralised manner, and it was done at scale. This was not done at a worker level; this was done at a whole simpler level," the he further claimed.
Last month, Gandhi, had claimed that over one lakh votes were "stolen" through manipulation in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka, and asserted that "vote chori" is an "atom bomb on our democracy".
Earlier in September, Gandh during his 'Voter Adhikar Yatra' asked the BJP people to get ready for "hydrogen bomb" regarding his allegations of vote theft, as what was shown about Mahadevpura constituency was just an "atom bomb."
