Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Saturday said that India’s election system is “already dead” and accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of rigging the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Speaking at the Annual Legal Conclave titled ‘Constitutional Challenges – Perspectives & Pathways’, Gandhi claimed that he has proof to back these serious allegations.
He said that the Congress party has conducted a six-month-long investigation and uncovered evidence showing that over 80 Lok Sabha seats were rigged. “The Prime Minister of India holds office with a very slim majority. If even 15 seats were rigged, he wouldn’t be PM. We suspect over 70 to 80 seats were manipulated. We will prove to the nation in the coming days how a Lok Sabha election can be stolen – and was stolen,” Gandhi said.
He also alleged that the Election Commission of India (ECI) has become non-functional. “We found that out of 6.5 lakh people who voted in one constituency, 1.5 lakh were fake voters. That means the institution that’s supposed to protect the Constitution has been completely taken over. The Election Commission does not exist anymore. It took us six months of non-stop work to find this evidence,” he added.
Gandhi said he had long suspected problems with the election process, starting from 2014. “In the Gujarat Assembly elections, I already felt something was off. And then in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat, Congress got zero seats. I kept wondering—how is this possible?”
He said that their doubts deepened after the Maharashtra elections. “We won the Lok Sabha election there. But just four months later in the Assembly elections, we were wiped out. Three strong parties vanished overnight. We started digging into it and found that around one crore new voters had been added between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections—and most of them voted for the BJP. That raised big questions.”
Rahul Gandhi concluded by saying, “People used to ask us, ‘Where is the proof?’ Now I can say with full confidence—we have the proof.”
The Election Commission, however, has responded by asking the public to ignore what it called “baseless allegations.”
