Will EC serve notice to Anurag Thakur as it did with Rahul, Congress asks

The Congress on Thursday hauled the Election Commission of India (ECI) over the coals for what it sees as a glaring double standard: Rahul Gandhi received an ECI notice within hours of his remarks on alleged poll irregularities on 7 August, but BJP leader and Union minister Anurag Thakur? Crickets.

The Opposition party also demanded that the 2024 Lok Sabha elections be “nullified” for being fought on “fake voter lists”, repeating a demand voiced by Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee on Tuesday.

At a press conference at the Congress headquarters, the party's media and publicity department head Pawan Khera did not hold back. According to him, if the BJP already has the electronic voter list data, the Congress should get it too — because that data, he insists, would show that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was actually losing from Varanasi until he got a “booster dose of fake voters”.

“Nullify the Lok Sabha elections, which were fought on the basis of a fake voters list, as proved by the ruling party MP Anurag Thakur,” Khera said. “We took six months to collect data for one Assembly segment of Mahadevapura (in Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency). Mr Anurag Thakur got the electronic voter list of six Lok Sabha seats within six days. If this is not collusion, what else is?”

The 'six Lok Sabha seats' Thakur alluded to — using a slide show fairly similar to the one used by Gandhi during his press conference — are Wayanad (Priyanka Gandhi Vadra), Rae Bareli (Rahul Gandhi), Diamond Harbour (Abhishek Banerjee), Kannauj (Akhilesh Yadav), and Mainpuri (Dimple Yadav), apart from Kolathur Assembly seat (M.K. Stalin).

Picking up Wayanad in particular, Khera pointed out that Thakur had flagged 93,000 'fake voters' in the constituency. "Priyanka Gandhi Vadraji won Wayanad by over 4.10 lakh votes, while the BJP polled about 1 lakh votes. Now we know where those votes came from. Without them, Priyanka Gandhiji would probably have won by 5 lakh votes. That's what we will go with," he said.

And in a moment of rare bipartisan agreement — at least on what happened — Khera even offered a backhanded thanks: “We thank Anurag Thakur and the BJP for proving the point made by Rahul Gandhi ji that the elections in this country are fought on the basis of fake voters.”

Khera’s challenge was straightforward: if Anurag Thakur has Varanasi’s electronic voter list, make it public. His claim? That Modi “is sitting in the prime minister’s chair by stealing it”.

He also wondered aloud about the sudden invisibility of the ECI top brass. “Both the ruling party and the opposition parties are questioning the Election Commission, but where is election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in such a situation?”

From there, Khera went in for the kill: “Anurag Thakur has exposed the collusion between the BJP and the Election Commission in front of the entire country. That’s why the whole nation is now saying — ‘vote chor, gaddi chhor (step down, vote thief)’... Shouldn’t this election be declared null and void?”

The sting in the Congress’ charge is sharpened by the timeline. Gandhi was slapped with an ECI notice within hours of his 7 August press conference, complete with a demand for an affidavit. But more than 24 hours after Thakur’s remarks? Still nothing.

“How did he manage to get this data so quickly?” Khera asked, noting that it took his party half-a-year to get just one constituency’s data. His conclusion: “It is clear that the Election Commission has the electronic voter list, which it does not want to share with the public or the Opposition.”

In what can only be described as a “retro” rebuttal, Thakur also claimed former Congress president Sonia Gandhi was on the voters’ roll before becoming an Indian citizen. Khera swatted that away with a grin: there was a ‘Janata government’ in place on 1 January 1980 — not a Congress administration — “and the BJP was self-indicting itself”.

"They are unable to answer today's questions and got a piece of paper from over 40 years ago when it was their government, and put themselves in the dock. This government will now remain in the dock for the next six to eight months till it survives," Khera said.

Hitting back at the BJP for claiming irregularities in the seats contested by top Opposition leaders, the Congress on Wednesday had also said the data shared by the ruling party points to its collusion with the ECI and demanded that the 2024 Lok Sabha polls be considered "null and void" for being held on "fake voter lists".