Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday claimed he had the “unique experience” of sharing tea with voters from Bihar whom the Election Commission (EC) had officially declared dead. The group of seven — all very much alive — visited Gandhi at his Delhi residence to recount how their names were struck off the electoral rolls under the EC’s special intensive revision (SIR) process.
“There have been many interesting experiences in life, but I never got the chance to have tea with ‘dead people’. For this unique experience, thank you Election Commission!” Gandhi quipped in Hindi on X, sharing a video of the interaction. In the clip, he jokingly tells the visitors to explore Delhi freely, as “the dead” cannot even be charged tickets.
The voters — Ramikbal Ray, Harendra Ray, Lalmuni Devi, Vachiya Devi, Lalwati Devi, Punam Kumari, and Munna Kumar — hail from Raghopur, the constituency of RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav. They said they learned of their “death” only when checking voter lists during the SIR, which has removed an estimated 65 lakh names from Bihar’s rolls ahead of polls.
According to them, they had submitted all required documents to confirm their eligibility, yet were marked as “dead” in EC records. They also appeared before the Supreme Court earlier in the day, which is hearing petitions challenging the SIR in Bihar.
The Congress, in a statement, alleged this was not an isolated error but part of a wider pattern of “political disenfranchisement.” The party claimed the EC had not made public the lists of voters marked as dead, migrated, or otherwise removed, and that its local teams identified these cases only through informal access to internal EC reports for a few polling booths.
“These seven are just the tip of the iceberg,” the statement read. “When the living are struck off as dead, the death certificate is issued to democracy itself. This is not a clerical mistake — it is a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters.”
The party also linked the episode to recent allegations of “vote theft” in Bengaluru, suggesting the Bihar revision exercise was “compromised” in a similar fashion.
