Shri Rahul Gandhi gives graphic description how BJP steals elections

New Delhi: The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Shri Rahul Gandhi provided indisputably conclusive evidence as to how the elections are being rigged and stolen by the Bharatiya Janata Party in collusion with the Election Commission of India.

Shri Rahul Gandhi gave a comprehensive, elaborate and detailed power-point presentation listing multiple ways by which the BJP steals the elections. Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha cited the revelations made during a comprehensive case study of the Mahadevapura assembly segment falling in Bangalore Central parliamentary constituency, where the result of 2024 General Elections showed an entirely different pattern from the rest of the Assembly constituencies. The detailed press briefing is as follows:-

Highlights of Shri Rahul Gandhi’s Press Conference on election fraud on August 7, 2025, at Indira Bhawan, New Delhi The foundation of our Constitution is based on the fact that one person gets one vote. So, the most fundamental thing is how secure is the idea of one person, one vote? Are the right people being allowed to vote? Are fake people being added to the voter list? Is the voter list accurate?

For some time now, there has been suspicion among millions of Indians based on a couple of points. Anti-incumbency is something that hits every single party in every democracy. But the BJP seems to be the only party in a democratic framework that is magically immune to anti-incumbency.

There is always a reason given by media for this lack of anti-incumbency, for opinion & exit polls going way off the mark, and for huge & unexpected victory margins for BJP. And these reasons are multiple – ‘Ladli Behna’ scheme, Pulwama attack, etc.

Another thing is that election schedule is choreographed. But today, elections go on sometimes for months. This was something that we were suspicious about. Before Maharashtra Assembly elections, we weren’t able to articulate the reason and logic behind our suspicion. But in Haryana and Maharashtra, we saw it right in front of us. In Maharashtra, more voters were added in 5 months than in 5 years, which was a staggering fact. Then, there was a huge jump in voter turnout after 5 pm. Our alliance, which had swept the Lok Sabha elections just a few months back, was wiped out in the Vidhan Sabha elections, which was very suspicious.

We found that between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections, one crore new voters had entered the picture. So, we approached the Election Commission. I spoke about it in Parliament. INDIA bloc leaders held a press conference, but there was no response. I then wrote an article that was published in several newspapers. It captured the crux of our argument: we believe that the Maharashtra election was stolen. And when the article came out, it created a flutter.

The voter list is the property of this country. The Election Commission absolutely refuses to give us the voter list. We requested a machine-readable Maharashtra voter list, but the EC rejected our plea. Machine-readable formats are key because we need soft copies to analyse the data. There was a question about massive voting after 5:30 pm in Maharashtra. But our people and alliance partners knew that didn’t happen in the polling booths. There were no large lines after 5:30 pm.

Election Commission not giving us machine-readable voter list and bogus claims about massive voting after 5:30 pm convinced us that EC colluded with BJP to steal elections in Maharashtra. However, we still lacked proof. We had evidence at the state-level in Maharashtra, showing voters had been added, but we didn’t know how the system works. So, we put together a team and told them we need to understand how this is being done.

This was the challenge. We had seven feet of paper, and we had to sort through every single one. It was a very tedious process. When we faced this, we realised why the Election Commission doesn’t give us electronic data - they don’t want us to scrutinise it carefully. This task took us six months, with 30-40 people working non-stop, comparing names, addresses, and pictures. This was just for one Assembly constituency, but we collected concrete evidence of ‘vote chori’.

If the Election Commission had given us electronic data, it would have taken only 30 seconds to analyse it. But the EC deliberately provides non-machine-readable papers. These papers themselves don’t allow for optical character recognition; if you scan them, you can’t extract the data.

As per our internal polls, we were expected to win 16 LS seats in Karnataka. However, we won 9. We then focused on the 7 unexpected losses and chose Mahadevapura, a Vidhan Sabha constituency falling under Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency.

In 2024 General elections, BJP won Bangalore Central LS seat with a margin of 32,707 votes. However, Congress won all the Vidhan Sabha segments falling under this seat except Mahadevapura, where BJP swept and secured a margin of 1,14,046 votes. This discrepancy is a huge imbalance. So, we started examining the details and discovered that approximately 1,00,250 votes were stolen out of 6.5 lakh total votes in Mahadevapura.

There were 5 types of ‘vote chori’: 11,965 duplicate voters; 40,009 voters with fake & invalid addresses; total 10,452 bulk voters registered at single addresses; 4,132 voters with no or invalid photos; and 33,692 new voters registered through misuse of form 6. The analysis of data showed that election was stolen in Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency in Karnataka in 2024 general elections.

What we are saying to the Election Commission is that you are not in the business of destroying Indian democracy, you are in the business of protecting it. All this information is now evidence. This is a crime being committed against the Indian Constitution. This is evidence of the crime in one Assembly seat. We have studied the pattern, and are absolutely convinced that this crime is being done on a huge scale across the country, in state after state after state.

The voter lists and the CCTV footage are now evidence of crime for us. And the Election Commission is busy trying to destroy this evidence. It has changed the rules to restrict access to CCTV footage. What is the EC hiding? If it does not give us machine-readable digital voter rolls for the past 10-15 years and the CCTV footage, it would mean it is partaking in the crime.

Earlier the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha said, the Election Commission should not be in the business of destroying the democracy but protecting it. He said, this is a crime being committed against the Indian Constitution and the Indian flag. He said, while data analysis in Mahadevapura has provided the evidence of the crime in one assembly segment, he was absolutely convinced that this was being done across the country. “For us, the CCTV footage, and the voter list is now evidence of crime and the ECI is busy trying to destroy it”, he noted.

“I want the nation to know, there is a huge criminal fraud being perpetrated on this country by the ECI and the party in power”, he warned The Election Commission must provide us all the data and share it with the people of India. The public has a right to complete transparency. If they fail to do so, there will be consequences for every single polling officer involved in this.

When the Opposition comes to power, they will face the repercussions of their actions, because they are attacking the foundation of what our freedom fighters built. We will not allow it to do so.