Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi escalated his charges against India’s electoral system Tuesday, accusing the government of “vote theft” through duplicate entries on voter lists.
During a lecture at Berlin’s Hertie School, Gandhi asserted that Congress triumphed in he 2024 Haryana Assembly elections, while Maharashtra’s polls fell short of fairness. He said that party complaints to the Election Commission drew no reply, despite clear evidence of irregularities.
Addressing the event titled “Politics Is The Art Of Listening,” Gandhi recounted Congress victories in Telangana and Himachal Pradesh and said: “We have won elections in Telangana, Himachal Pradesh. We have been raising issues as far as the fairness of elections in India is concerned. I have done press conferences in India where we have clearly shown without a shadow of a doubt that we won the Haryana election and that we don’t feel the Maharashtra elections were fair.”
“There is a full-scale assault taking place on the institutional framework of our country. We asked direct questions to the Election Commission,” he stated.
He further spotlighted that a Brazilian woman’s name was on the voter list and that she had voted 22 times in Haryana. “We did not get a response. We fundamentally believe that there is a problem with the electoral machinery in India,” Gandhi claimed.
Gandhi then turned to his familiar critique of institutional overreach, claiming the Centre has turned probe agencies into political weapons. Business tycoons who back the BJP escape scrutiny, he said, while opposition funders face intimidation.
“There is a wholesale capture of our institutional framework. Our intelligence agencies, ED and CBI, have been weaponised. ED and CBI have zero cases against the BJP, and most of the political cases are against the people who oppose them. If you are a businessman and try to support the Congress, you are threatened. BJP uses the institutional framework of India as a tool to build political power. Look at the money the BJP has and the Opposition has,” he charged.
Congress, he vowed, would forge a “system of resistance” to reclaim democratic guardrails. “There is an attack on the democratic system. We have to find ways to counter this. We will create a system of opposition resistance that will succeed. We are not fighting the BJP, but their capture of the Indian institutional structure,” Gandhi declared.
The leader continues his five-day Germany tour amid ongoing accusations of election rigging through voter list tampering, a refrain he has repeated consistently.
