New Delhi, September 20: India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused the country’s top election official of protecting those trying to undermine democracy by refusing to share details about alleged fraudulent voter deletions in Karnataka, a charge the Election Commission (EC) dismissed as baseless.
Gandhi, leader of the Congress party in parliament, said 6,018 votes were targeted for deletion in the Aland constituency of Karnataka’s Kalaburagi district ahead of last year’s state election using centralised software and phones registered outside the state.
The state’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has written 18 times in 18 months seeking the internet protocol (IP) addresses used to file online deletion requests but has received no response from the poll panel, Gandhi told reporters in New Delhi.
“Our demand is, Gyanesh Kumar, do your job. You are India’s Chief Election Commissioner. You must give evidence to the Karnataka CID,” Gandhi said, warning that if the EC did not share the details within a week it would be seen as “complicit in the murder of the Constitution.”
The Election Commission said in a statement that Gandhi’s allegations were “incorrect and baseless.”
Gandhi said many of the deletion requests targeted Congress strongholds and cited cases where multiple fraudulent applications were filed in the names of individual voters. He also pointed to what he called similar “vote theft” in Maharashtra’s Rajura constituency, where nearly 7,000 voters were allegedly added using automated software, and claimed the practice extended to other states including Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
“This is being done using a software at a call centre,” Gandhi said. “When they are not giving this information, they are defending the murderers of democracy.”
Last month Gandhi alleged that more than 100,000 votes were stolen through manipulation in one constituency during the 2024 national election.
