With the Bihar Assembly elections just around the corner, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused the Election Commission of India of colluding with the BJP to manipulate the results of the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections. Speaking at a press conference at the AICC headquarters, Gandhi claimed that nearly 25 lakh votes in Haryana were fake, representing about one in eight voters in the state.
“Twenty-five lakh voters in Haryana are fake. They either don’t exist, are duplicates, or have been created in a way that allows anyone to vote. That’s 12.5% of the voters,” Gandhi said. He alleged that a scheme called “Operation Sarkar Chori” was implemented to turn what should have been a Congress landslide into a loss. To back his claims, he cited examples of a Brazilian model whose photograph appeared 22 times under different names and another woman listed 223 times across two polling booths. “This is evidence of a centralized operation. How can a Brazilian model be a voter in Haryana?” he asked.
Gandhi also said that 3.5 lakh voters, mostly Congress supporters, were removed from the voter list before the elections. He accused the Chief Election Commissioner and other officials of working with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to secure a BJP victory. Pointing to postal votes, he said, “For the first time in Haryana, postal votes went in the opposite direction of the booth votes. Congress got 73 postal votes, BJP got 17. This has never happened before.” He also shared a video of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, recorded two days after the election, confidently saying that “arrangements” had been made for the BJP’s win. “Look at his smile. This was after the election when everyone said Congress was sweeping the polls,” Gandhi said.
He further alleged that the Election Commission deliberately ignored duplicate voter entries and destroyed CCTV footage from polling booths. “The EC can remove duplicates in a second. They don’t do it because they are helping the BJP,” he claimed. Gandhi added that voters had been registered in multiple states, making it possible for the BJP to manipulate votes.
Addressing questions about legal action, Gandhi said the Supreme Court was already aware of the evidence. “We are presenting this in front of the media, and all the data comes from the EC itself,” he said. He criticized the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of voter lists in other states, saying, “If the voter list is flawed, the election is flawed. The integrity of elections is at stake.”
The BJP dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as baseless. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju accused him of trying to defame India and shift attention from the Bihar elections. “Polling is happening in Bihar, yet he is talking about Haryana. He is changing the narrative because there’s nothing left in Bihar,” Rijiju said. He added that differences between exit polls and final results are normal and said Gandhi should have followed legal procedures instead of creating panic.
Despite BJP’s response, Gandhi insisted that the evidence was clear. He noted that Congress lost several Haryana constituencies by very narrow margins, which he argued could have been avoided if the alleged voter manipulation had not taken place. “The rules say if a house has more than ten voters, ground verification is required. That hasn’t been done here,” he said, insisting that the Haryana elections had been compromised.
