Rahul's 'H bomb': Massive rigging in Haryana, calls it ‘centrally carried out vote theft’

Just a day before first phase of polling for the Bihar Assembly elections, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday, 5 November, levelled serious allegations of large-scale electoral fraud in Haryana, claiming that over 5.21 lakh duplicate voters had been identified in the 2024 Assembly elections, which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won.

Addressing a press conference in New Delhi, the Congress MP accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of facilitating what he described as an “industrialised system” of vote manipulation. “This is not happening merely at the constituency level but at both State and national levels. The Election Commission does not want a fair election — this is absolute proof of what the BJP is doing,” Gandhi said.

The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha alleged that the BJP, in collaboration with the ECI, had engineered the creation of duplicate and fake voter entries across multiple States. “Some BJP leaders have been registered as voters in two States. In Haryana alone, one voter appeared 223 times in two booths,” he claimed, adding that “1,24,177 voters with identical photographs” were found on the rolls.

Gandhi further alleged that a photograph of a Brazilian model was used to create thousands of fake voter identities across ten polling booths, suggesting a coordinated operation. “Around 25 lakh voters in Haryana were fake. They even used a Brazilian model’s photo on multiple voter IDs,” he said, calling it part of what he dubbed ‘Operation Sarkar Chori’ — an alleged attempt to convert the Congress’s “landslide victory into a loss”.

Reiterating his long-standing charge that constitutional institutions have been compromised, Gandhi directly targeted the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar, accusing him of “protecting those destroying Indian democracy”. He further alleged that the ECI had “destroyed CCTV footage” and deliberately withheld technical data on voter deletions.

“The Election Commission is in partnership with the Prime Minister and the Home Minister, and together they have destroyed Indian democracy,” he said, warning that similar tactics could be deployed in the forthcoming Bihar elections.

Gandhi also released a video purportedly showing Kerala BJP vice-president B. Gopalakrishnan boasting about manipulating electoral rolls. “This is not an isolated case, it is an industrial system of vote theft,” he asserted.

Inviting residents of Bihar’s Jamui district, who he claimed had been disenfranchised, to come forward with evidence of deleted names, Gandhi said the “voter list comes at the last minute”, making verification difficult and enabling manipulation.

This is not the first time Gandhi has hinted at a large-scale exposé. On 1 September, he had warned of releasing a “hydrogen bomb” of evidence on electoral fraud, saying that earlier revelations regarding Karnataka’s Mahadevpura constituency were only an “atom bomb”.

With these latest allegations, Gandhi has reignited the opposition’s offensive against the BJP and the Election Commission, setting the stage for an intense political confrontation ahead of crucial State elections.

With Agency Inputs