Rahul Gandhi’s 'H-Files': The darkness behind the memes

For an event billed as explosive, Rahul Gandhi’s 'H-Files' presentation on Haryana’s alleged vote chori (theft) felt eerily calm. The real detonation came later — not from his slides, but from what they implied: that the Election Commission of India (ECI) had quietly built an architecture of impunity and then accused others of noise.

The irony of the moment went largely unnoticed amid the memes. The data Gandhi showcased — including the now-famous Brazilian model allegedly cloned into 22 separate voter IDs — wasn’t leaked from a dark web server, nor fished out by partisan sleuths. It came directly from the ECI’s own publicly available datasets.

Armed with that data, Gandhi alleged that nearly 25 lakh voter entries in Haryana’s rolls were either duplicates, invalid or mass-registered at identical addresses. His point was blunt: this wasn’t Opposition fiction — this was the ECI’s paperwork indicting itself.

In a video statement following Gandhi's press conference in New Delhi, political activist Yogendra Yadav mapped the story across India. “What began in Mahadevapura, Bengaluru,” he said, “travelled to Aland in Karnataka — and has now reached Haryana. What started as one constituency’s complaint has become a state-wide story. A single woman’s photo appears at 200 locations under different names. This isn’t a clerical error. This is a systematic game.”

The Brazilian model became the meme, but the real punchline was institutional: that the ECI's own data visualised its failure — and that it is empowered to destroy the very footage that might have corroborated it.

In June, a couple of months before Gandhi’s first presentation on the subject of "vote chori", the ECI quietly updated its manual: all CCTV footage and video recordings from polling stations are to be destroyed within 45 days of polling. Forty-five days. That’s less time than it takes many election petitions even to be admitted in court. After that, the tapes vanish — and so does accountability.

For a body that regularly lectures parties about transparency, the decision is almost avant-garde in its audacity. Imagine a crime branch ordering all CCTV footage deleted six weeks after a heist. The ECI, apparently, just did.

Add to this the 2023 law pushed through by the Modi government: the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, which grants the commissioners blanket legal immunity for anything done “in the discharge of official duty”.

Translation: you can’t prosecute, sue, or even meaningfully challenge them for misconduct.

The Commission that once claimed to be a guardian of electoral purity has become the most legally untouchable institution in the republic — an irony so dense it could power a satire series.

Predictably, the BJP and its social-media militia didn’t contest the data. They mocked the delivery. Union minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat posted: “Rahul Gandhi’s atom bomb turns out to be a damp cracker.” Haryana chief minister Nayab Singh Saini accused the Congress of “misleading the nation”, while spokesperson Sambit Patra chirped that the opposition was “importing Brazilian glamour into Indian democracy”.

The memes wrote themselves: 'Haryana welcomes Miss Democracy 2024.' 'From Rio to Rohtak: One Voter, Many Visas.' It was textbook deflection — mock the absurd image, ignore the institutional rot beneath it.

Unmoved by the circus, Yadav kept his focus on process. “Before the Lok Sabha elections — and especially after the BJP’s defeat — something big was done in Haryana. Remember, there are indications that 3.5 lakh names were deleted just before the Assembly polls. Now that the evidence is before the nation, the ball is in the Election Commission’s court.”

The Commission’s response, as ever, was a masterpiece of bureaucratic evasion. Anonymous officials told the press that the Congress had filed “no formal objections” during the revision of rolls — as though citizen disenfranchisement were valid until notarised.

Yadav anticipated that too: “No worker can monitor 15 booths alone. The list published 15 days before polling, the one given to candidates a month earlier, and the one used at the booth — all differ. If the Election Commission can’t fix it, let parties verify the rolls themselves.”

The Haryana controversy arrives as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process itself faces challenge in the Supreme Court. The petitions, first filed over Bihar’s rolls, accuse the Commission of “arbitrary deletions” and “systematic disenfranchisement”.

The Supreme Court has already asked the ECI to publish the names of deleted voters with reasons — a basic demand the Commission has resisted for months. In Tamil Nadu, all major parties have jointly moved to challenge SIR as “anti-democratic”, while in West Bengal, chief minister Mamata Banerjee took out a massive protest rally in a show of strength on Tuesday, 4 November, when the Bengal SIR kicked off.

That the same ECI now stands accused in case after case — while simultaneously authoring a 45-day evidence-destruction rule — would almost be funny, if it weren’t terrifying.

Under Narendra Modi’s government, the ECI’s transformation has been quietly spectacular. Once the symbol of institutional independence, it has mastered the art of compliance through technicality. Every act of omission is wrapped in procedure; every refusal comes footnoted with “due process”.

Even Gandhi’s use of its own data will likely invite the standard counter: misinterpretation of public records. The ECI doesn’t deny. It deflects. And it now does so from behind legal armour no citizen can pierce.

In the 2024 Haryana Assembly election, the BJP won 48 of 90 seats despite most exit polls hinting at a Congress sweep. Gandhi claims that was the moment “democracy was algorithmically altered”. The Commission insists everything was “free and fair”.

The truth, as usual, lies smothered between spreadsheets and slogans. The broader public debate, however, has reduced to theatre: the government laughs at Gandhi’s PowerPoints; Gandhi ridicules the government’s silence; and the Commission quietly orders another round of shredding — digital this time.

The real joke isn’t on a Brazilian model voting in Haryana. It’s on an election authority that claims to guard democracy while deleting its own CCTV evidence after 45 days, protected by a statute that forbids anyone from asking why.

It’s a system where data exposing malpractice comes from the same institution accused of enabling it — and where those pointing it out are mocked for noticing.

Yadav, for his part, delivered the only line that truly landed: “Everyone suspected something was amiss,” he said. “Now the evidence is before the nation. If the Election Commission won’t wake up, when will we?”

The question should embarrass the ECI. Instead, it echoes unanswered inside a bureaucracy that now reports only to itself.

The 'H-Files' may or may not lead to legal consequences, but they have already done one thing: they have forced the spotlight back on the hollowed-out centre of India’s electoral machinery on the eve of the first phase of a crucial Assembly election in Bihar.

A Commission that deletes video evidence, a government that writes immunity into law, and a nation so used to irony it mistakes accountability for humour — that’s where the real vote chori lives.

And so, as memes of Brazilian models circle the internet, India’s election watchdog keeps the last laugh — quietly shredding its own surveillance tapes, forty-five days at a time.