Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge launched a scathing attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday, accusing the ruling party of engineering a calculated conspiracy to undermine Indian democracy through systemic “vote theft”. In a sharp critique shared on social media, Kharge claimed that the BJP’s electoral tactics involve manipulating voter rolls to suit their political convenience-adding voters where favorable and fragmenting or deleting them elsewhere.
He also directed harsh criticism at the Election Commission, alleging that the poll body has abandoned its constitutional duty as an impartial guardian of fair elections to function as a “Save BJP’s Chair Commission”.
Highlighting discrepancies across several states, Kharge pointed to glaring electoral shifts in several states. For Maharashtra, he pointed out that 3.9 million new voters were suddenly added between the Lok Sabha and assembly elections, he noted that a massive 2.07 crore voters have now been left off the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) draft list.
For West Bengal, he highlighting past patterns, he noted that 91% of names previously removed from the SIR lists had to be reinstated following appeals, raising questions about whether those deletions were timed to engineer a BJP victory.
For Delhi, Kharge warned that a similar playbook is unfolding in the national capital, Kharge claimed voter numbers swelled ahead of assembly polls only for 4.756 million names to vanish from the draft list, with notices reportedly being readied for another 3.3 million individuals.
Kharge added that party workers in Telangana and Karnataka are continuously confronting similar administrative manipulations. “The country is now uniting against vote theft. The nation has understood the BJP’s conspiracy,” Kharge asserted, warning that the perpetrators would ultimately face accountability for holding democracy captive.
Rahul Gandhi, who is Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, alleged in a post on X that the BJP “does not listen” to the people or obey their command, as its government is built on “vote theft”. The fresh “vote theft” allegations have resurfaced amid preparations by political parties for assembly polls in Goa, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Manipur early next year.
