Rahul Gandhi’s ‘vote theft’ bomb not ‘news’ to Karnataka

Rahul Gandhi’s exposé of ‘vote theft’ during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections put the spotlight on the Bengaluru Central constituency.

At a press conference in New Delhi on 7 August, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha shared explosive evidence of electoral manipulation, pointing to voter list irregularities, suspicious turnout patterns and suppression of electronic data. He termed the stealing of votes “an atom bomb on our democracy”.

In 2024, Bengaluru Central was retained for the fourth consecutive time by the BJP’s P.C. Mohan. The margin of victory was 32,707 votes, significantly lower than the 70,968 margin in 2019, which itself was well below the 1,37,500-vote margin in 2014.

The defeat in 2024 of AICC secretary Mansoor Ali Khan by a small margin galvanised Congress’ poll managers to do a deep dive into the statistics thrown up post-results.

Bengaluru Central was carved out of Bengaluru North and Bengaluru South Lok Sabha constituencies after the delimitation in 2008. Of the eight assembly segments in the Lok Sabha constituency, the Congress represents five and the BJP three. The constituency is dominated by minority voters, which is one of the reasons why the Congress has always fielded a Muslim or a Christian from this seat since 2009.

The BJP has been backing Mohan — who belongs to the Other Backward Classes (OBC) — since 2009. The constituency has approximately 5 lakh Muslim voters and another 6 lakh OBCs.

In the 2024 general elections, Khan maintained a good lead in the assembly segments represented by the Congress, kindling early hopes of wresting the seat from the BJP. However, the party’s strongholds — Mahadevapura, one of the biggest reserved constituencies, and Rajajinagar — tilted the results in favour of the BJP. Of the 6.5 lakh votes in Mahadevapura, there was ‘vote chori’ of over 1 lakh votes, said the LoP at the 7 August press conference.

Weighing in on the issue, former Congress MLC Prakash K. Rathod said vote theft was not new. He attributed his own defeat in the Vijayapura Lok Sabha (reserved) constituency to proxy voting in both 2009 and 2014.

Rathod, who represents the Lambani community, said 99 per cent of the community had voted for him. However, an analysis revealed that nearly 32,000 Lambani votes had gone to the BJP. “We had suspected that something was not right with the EVMs. In the 2023 assembly polls, 4,000 proxy voters were caught with duplicate voter cards in Bhutnal, a Lambani thanda (revenue pocket) of Vijayapura,” Rathod alleged.

Rahul Gandhi’s protest in Bengaluru on 8 August came amid a wider national controversy over large-scale tampering of electoral rolls, particularly in the wake of recent developments in Bihar and Maharashtra. Gandhi had earlier claimed that his party had uncovered the Election Commission’s modus operandi and had an “atom bomb” of evidence against the alleged electoral manipulations.