Congress hits EC as Venugopal alleges ‘managed mandate’ in Bihar over voter deletions

The Congress has sharpened its assault on the Bihar assembly election outcome, with party general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal denouncing the mandate as “managed, fabricated and deeply compromised”, a phrase that set the tone for a dramatic escalation in the party’s rhetoric.

Venugopal’s indictment of the electoral process came in a strongly worded post on X, issued after an exhaustive four-hour review meeting in Delhi. The session, chaired by the Congress president and the leader of the Opposition, brought together candidates and senior leaders from Bihar, all of whom, he said, painted a troubling portrait of what transpired during the state polls.

According to Venugopal, the accounts shared in the meeting did not resemble the natural rhythms of a democratic exercise but instead converged into a narrative of what he described as a “distorted electoral process” — one that, in the party’s telling, bore the imprint of manipulation rather than the will of the people. Candidates reportedly detailed irregularities they believed tainted the very foundations of the contest: unexplained voter deletions, suspicious last-minute additions, and the alleged use of government welfare schemes as instruments of influence.

A central concern was the use of the State Identification Register. Several candidates, Venugopal said, had documented patterns suggesting that the SIR was deployed in a targeted fashion — pruning names of traditional supporters while allowing “dubious additions” to glide in. They referred to numerous instances where long-time voters arrived at polling stations only to discover that their names had vanished from the rolls, despite consistent documentation and a history of participation in past elections.

Equally alarming to the party were allegations regarding the MMRY (Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana) scheme. According to leaders present at the meeting, funds under the programme were disbursed just days — and in some cases mere hours — before polling, in a manner they argued was indistinguishable from on-the-ground inducements. Some candidates claimed the benefits were handed out perilously close to polling booths, raising for them uncomfortable questions about the sanctity and neutrality of polling-day operations.

Another thread woven through the meeting was what Venugopal called the “statistical oddity” of strikingly similar victory margins across a wide swath of constituencies. In a state governed by complex caste dynamics, diverse candidate profiles and local peculiarities, such uniformity, Congress leaders said, defied the norms of electoral behaviour and demanded close scrutiny.

Though these remain allegations made by the Congress, the party has cast them as signposts of what it terms “organised electoral malpractice,” a phenomenon it warns could have implications far beyond Bihar.

In his post on X, Venugopal also launched a frontal attack on the Election Commission of India, accusing the institution of shedding its constitutional detachment. He charged the ECI with behaving “less as a neutral arbiter and more as an enabler of the ruling BJP’s strategy”, particularly in its oversight of the Model Code of Conduct and its management of election-day mechanisms. Such conduct, he wrote, appeared “partisan” and troublingly aligned with the interests of the ruling party.

The Congress has vowed to pursue legal, political and organisational avenues to contest what it calls a “stolen mandate”, asserting that the events in Bihar are not an isolated aberration but part of a deeper national concern over the erosion of electoral integrity.

“What happened in Bihar is a direct assault on democracy,” Venugopal declared, concluding with a pledge that the Congress’s struggle to “protect India’s democratic foundations” would continue “fearlessly, relentlessly and with the people by our side”.

With IANS inputs