Maharashtra Congress workers took to the streets in Mumbai on Friday, protesting against the Election Commission of India (ECI) following renewed allegations of large-scale electoral fraud made by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Gandhi, speaking out on Thursday, warned that democracy in India is facing a serious threat and called for judicial intervention. He alleged that during the period between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections in Maharashtra, over one crore new voters were mysteriously added to the electoral rolls in just five months—a number greater than what was added over five years previously.
He also accused the Election Commission of deliberately destroying CCTV footage from polling booths despite suspicious spikes in voter turnout after 5:30 PM in certain areas. According to Gandhi, Congress booth workers did not witness any such surge in voting, suggesting that the footage destruction was part of a larger attempt to cover up irregularities.
Adding to the controversy, Gandhi said the ECI refused to provide voter lists in a usable digital format and instead handed over printed sheets formatted to block Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning. “This is why we are being given data like this — so it is not analysed,” he claimed. Gandhi further revealed that his team spent six months manually verifying records for a single constituency.
To substantiate his allegations, Gandhi cited the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency in Karnataka, where he alleged that over one lakh fraudulent votes were cast in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. His detailed breakdown included:
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11,965 duplicate voters
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40,009 fake or invalid addresses
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10,452 bulk voters sharing the same address
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4,132 invalid photographs
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33,692 cases of misuse of Form 6
While Congress won six out of seven segments in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat, Gandhi pointed out that they lost Mahadevapura by over 1,14,000 votes, a margin he insists was inflated through “vote chori” (vote theft).
