Rahul Gandhi dropped another major “vote chori” claim on Wednesday, alleging a massive fraud in the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections that saw the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retain power. The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha claimed that 25 lakh votes were “stolen” in the state, amounting to roughly 12.5 per cent of its two crore voters.
Speaking at a press conference in New Delhi, Gandhi accused the Election Commission of facilitating a “centralised operation” to rig the results. “This means one in every eight voters in Haryana is fake,” he said, asserting that his team had “100 per cent proof” of the manipulation.
The Congress leader pointed to stark discrepancies between exit polls which predicted a Congress win, and the final results that handed the BJP a narrow victory. Gandhi also cited alleged irregularities in postal ballots, questioning the transparency of the entire electoral process.
An example presented by Gandhi involved the image of a Brazilian model, Matheus Ferrero. According to him, Ferrero’s freely available stock photograph was used 22 times in the Haryana voter list, appearing under different names such as “Sweety”, “Seema”, and “Saraswati”.
Displaying the alleged duplicates, Gandhi said, “The Election Commission can remove these in seconds. Why don’t they do it? Because they are helping the BJP.” He argued that the repetition of the same image across multiple voter IDs revealed deliberate manipulation rather than a clerical error.
Rahul Gandhi also played a video of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini speaking to the media before the results, claiming that the BJP had already made “arrangements” to win. “What were these arrangements?” Gandhi asked,
Previously, Rahul Gandhi had accused Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar of shielding those “destroying” Indian democracy by refusing to reveal details of people allegedly involved in deleting voter names from the Mahadevpura rolls in Karnataka. The Election Commission of India (ECI) dismissed Gandhi’s claims as “incorrect and baseless,” insisting its procedures were transparent and lawful.
