Rahul Gandhi’s press conference on 18 September once again brought forth highly explosive material, meticulously documented and presented.
Taking on from his 7 September press conference when he 'exposed' the deletion of votes in Bangalore’s Mahadevapura Assembly constituency (where he presented evidence of the deletion of 1,00,250 votes), in the Lok Sabha 2024 elections, this one focused on the 6,018 “applications” for deletion of bona fide voters in the Aland constituency.
What was perhaps more significant about the exposé this time was that it zeroed in on the possible modus operandi of vote chori – that these deletions were being done in a centralised way, possibly through some call centre, by using phone numbers of bona fide owners in an unauthorised way.
Gandhi did not emphasise this part, but this is equally a criminal act and it seems quite evident that the Election Commission of India (ECI) is involved in this dual crime of hijacking of the electoral system and doing that through unauthorised access to and use of phone numbers belonging to unsuspecting citizens.
Will the CEC Answer?
Had the EC been innocent in this matter, would it not cooperate with, and respond to the probe initiated by the Karnataka CID? What the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) did was worse.
It has not responded to as many as 18 reminders by the Karnataka CID asking for IP addresses and other details through which fake logins were allegedly created in the name of persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, were filing deletion applications. The figures so far presented by Gandhi are just the tip of the iceberg. For this is not something that has just happened accidentally in one or two seats.
It is part of a much bigger design, and the CEC ought to know that by evading responding to these very serious charges, he is only affirming the CEC office's complicity in this matter.
Gyanesh Kumar and his cohorts ought to know that the reason why Gandhi's expose is receiving such spontaneous response from the electorate at large, is because it has been a far more generalised experience for voters across the country.
Real Time Proof
Consider a few instances:
Eighteen days before Gandhi’s second press conference on the tampering with voters’ lists, my sister who has been a journalist for over thirty-five years now, received a letter from the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO), Assembly Constituency 45, Mehrauli.
Dated 29 August 2025, the letter informed her that “it has been reported to the undersigned by the BLO (Block Level Officer) that you are not ordinarily residing at the above address (PERMANEN SHIFTED)…Therefore," the letter further stated, “the undersigned proposes to delete your name from the electoral rolls…”
She was directed by the ERO to appear before him at 11 am by 10 September 2025 at the Voter Registration and Epic Centre or “send at email (sic): mehrauliac@yahoo.com”.
Notice that the email address on which she was supposed to write is not an official government account but a private yahoo address, which itself ought to be a matter of investigation under these circumstances.
It is interesting that in my sister’s case, the pattern was exactly the one mentioned by Rahul Gandhi with regard to the first case that the BLO in Aland stumbled upon. Upon inquiring as about the ARO’s source of information regarding her shifting from her residence, my sister was told that the neighbour had informed the BLO.
Meanwhile, she decided to share the information on X (Twitter), tagging the “CeodelhiOffice” along with the additional, startling information that while voting during the 2024 elections, she and her husband (also a journalist of very long standing) had “spotted two extra names on our address”, which they immediately pointed out to the election officers in their booth.
Where did these extra names appear from, suddenly after 35 years?
I also learnt from my family members in Dehradun that in the 2024 elections, who had been regularly voting for the last forty years from the same address, found that suddenly there were some changes in information in the voters lists that led to mismatch with that in their voters ID card. On inquiring from friends elsewhere in Dehradun, they learnt that in fact, many people across the town had faced a similar problem, leading to their not being allowed to vote.
It is also on record that from December 2024 onwards, the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi had been bringing out information not just of proposed voter deletions in different constituencies but also of additions of large numbers of fake voters in addresses like the servants’ quarters of some members of parliament.
In some cases, the attempts at deletions could be stalled due to timely detection and intervention. In early March 2025, the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal had raised a furor after innumerable “ghost voters”, all sharing the same EPIC number were discovered by it. Till then however, the full contours of the operation had not become clear. We owe it to Rahul Gandhi and his Congress team to have done the meticulous work of research and of connecting the dots.
ECI's Role Goes Beyond Compilation of Voter Lists
Much of this large-scale tampering with voters’ lists began during former CEC Rajiv Kumar’s tenure and it has continued with renewed vigour in Gyanesh Kumar’s. Let it be clear that this is only one of the many ways in which the ECI is being made into an accomplice of the powers that be.
For, the ECI’s task goes far beyond compiling voters’ lists.
For instance, once the model code of conduct becomes operative, it is basically the ECI that is supposed to take over the task of conducting free and fair elections. If the ruling party can still terrorise Opposition leaders through the use of the ED or CBI, arbitrarily arrest sitting Chief Ministers belonging to Opposition parties, indulge in blatantly communal propaganda using religion in election speeches, then it is the ECI’s job to ensure that such things do not happen.
But these are things we have already forgotten to expect from the ECI – such has become their record over the past ten years.
The fact of the matter is that because the Election Commission of India is charged with the responsibility of conducting free and fair elections, its job extends beyond ensuring that elections are held in a free and transparent way, for it must equally ensure that public trust in the process remains strong.
Instead of gaslighting the Indian public by demanding that Rahul Gandhi present his case with “affidavit under oath” as Gyanesh Kumar did earlier, or make meaningless statements without responding to any of the serious charges, as he has done now, the ECI should respond to any query, even of ordinary citizens, to dispel doubts about the process.
By not responding to concrete questions and arrogantly replying like experiencedpoliticians, the CEC’s conduct only goes to show that he is guilty of complicity in the slow murder of India’s democracy.
(Aditya Nigam is a political theorist based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)