• Pawan Khera

New Delhi: At a press conference at the AICC Headquarters in New Delhi on August 14, 2025, Shri Pawan Khera cited BJP leader Anurag Thakur’s remarks from a day earlier, asserting that Anurag Thakur had “validated, with evidence, what Rahul Gandhi had said a week ago.”

The Congress today demanded that the 2024 General Elections be nullified, alleging they were “fought and won fraudulently” by the BJP with fake votes. Party spokesperson and Chairperson of the Media and Publicity Department Shri Pawan Khera declared, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not deserve to be where he is, as he won with a ‘booster dose’ of fake votes.” “The press conference proved that the last General Election was held on fake votes,” Shri Pawan Khera said, asking, “Shouldn’t that election be cancelled?” He added: “Nullify the Lok Sabha elections, which were fought on the basis of fake votes as proved by Thakur.”

Shri Pawan Khera pointed out that Thakur, in his press conference, had claimed there were bogus votes in six constituencies, including Amethi, Raebareli, Wayanad and Diamond Harbour—”thus deliberately or inadvertently admitting that fake voters did exist.” He demanded that the Election Commission of India (ECI) and Thakur also make public the electronic voter list data of Varanasi. “We know the Prime Minister does not deserve to be where he is as, based on fake votes, he barely managed to win the Varanasi seat in 2024,” Shri Pawan Khera said. While the BJP was “still feeling the tremors of the earthquake set off by Rahul Gandhi’s August 7 revelations,” Shri Pawan Khera said, the Party had “tried to come up with a lame defence” but instead “ended up providing the evidence of crime, thus confirming the suspicion as truth.”

Shri Pawan Khera contrasted the Congress’ efforts with Thakur’s: “While it took the Congress six months to study and identify fake votes in a single assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency, Thakur managed to get the machine-readable electronic data of entire six parliamentary constituencies within six days.” This, he said, “proved the collusion between the ECI and the BJP.” He added that while the Congress and other opposition parties were denied such data, “the BJP gets it very easily from the ECI.”

He also questioned the ECI’s selective action, and collusion between the BJP and the ECI: “While Gandhi was still addressing the press conference, the ECI issued a notice asking him to file an affidavit about his revelations. Now 24 hours have already passed since Thakur made similar revelations, has the ECI issued him any such notice?” This comes after the ECI has failed to demand evidence under oath from Thakur whose allegations of inaccurate voter lists are wider in scope than Rahul Gandhi’s.

AICC Media Chairperson demanded that Thakur hand-over all the evidence he displayed to the Congress, calling it the “evidence of crime” that Gandhi had exposed earlier. “You have proved all those charges true,” he told the BJP leader.

Suggesting that Thakur should also have revealed the voter data for Varanasi “where Prime Minister Modi won by a slim margin” Shri Pawan Khera argued, “Had PM Modi not got a ‘booster dose’ of fake votes, he would have lost.”

Concluding the press conference, he stressed that this was no longer just an opposition demand: “The slogan, ‘vote chor, gaddi chhor,’ is reverberating in the entire country and has become a mass movement now.”

The author is the Chairman, Media and Publicity Department, AICC