Congress turns up the heat, sets stage for mass rally against ‘vote chori’

In a stirring escalation of its “vote chori” campaign, the Congress on Friday declared that it will gather thousands at Delhi’s historic Ramlila Maidan on 14 December — a rally pitched not merely as a protest, but as a mass awakening against what it calls a creeping subversion of Indian democracy.

The party sharpened its accusations against the Election Commission of India (ECI), claiming that an institution once regarded as the stoic sentinel of free and fair elections has now “shed its neutrality” and drifted into the role of a “blatantly partisan player”, tilting the democratic scales with alarming brazenness.

Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal described the spectre of “vote chori” as the gravest danger haunting the country’s democratic foundations today. “To send a message across the nation against these attempts to destroy our Constitution,” he announced, “the Congress will hold the ‘Vote Chor Gaddi Chhod’ Maha Rally on 14 December.” The event, he said, will be the first roar of a long battle to reclaim the republic from “those who seek to manipulate its very soul”.

Venugopal claimed that the party has received “crores of signatures” from across India — voices of outrage rejecting what he called the BJP–ECI nexus’s “nefarious tactics”: adding fictitious voters, deleting voters inclined toward the Opposition, and mass-manipulating electoral rolls. “Every Indian has seen,” he said, “how the ECI bends rules, ignores blatant violations, and indulges in daylight bribery to help the BJP rig elections.”

Once a revered umpire, the ECI has now “obliterated the very idea of a level playing field,” he said grimly. “We will not remain silent as this attack on the electoral system unfolds. This Maha Rally is only the beginning of our fight to wrest Indian democracy back from the vote chors.”

The confrontation has been building for weeks. Earlier, the Congress accused the Election Commission of crafting a “sinister design” through the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls — an exercise the party claims is being “weaponised” to delete targeted voters under the BJP’s direction.

The alarm deepened after the party’s setback in Bihar. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge convened a tense meeting with key office-bearers from 12 states and Union Territories where the SIR is underway, accusing the BJP of attempting to “rig the future” by manipulating the present. Rahul Gandhi and senior AICC leaders joined the review, calling the poll body’s conduct during SIR “deeply disappointing.”

These 12 regions — including Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Lakshadweep — are at the heart of a rolling electoral churn, with four of them heading toward elections in 2026. Phase 2 of the SIR process, which began on 4 November, continues until 4 December — a timeline that has only heightened Congress’s suspicions.

And so, the stage is set.
A charged winter afternoon at Ramlila Maidan.
A claim that democracy itself hangs in the balance.
And a rally that the Congress hopes will ignite a nationwide reckoning — the opening act of a much larger war it vows to wage against “vote chori”.

With PTI inputs