Image Source: Agencies

Aug 7, 2025: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday cited an analysis of data from a Lok Sabha constituency in Karnataka from the 2024 general elections to allege that the Election Commission is colluding with the BJP to "steal elections" and called it a "crime" against the Constitution.
The Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition stated during a press conference held at the AICC headquarters that within six months, the Congress assembled a team and gathered "concrete evidence of vote chori." If the EC does not give us machine-readable data for the past 10-15 years and the CCTV footage, they are partaking in the crime, Gandhi said.
The former president of the Congress stated, "The judiciary needs to get involved in this because the democracy that we love so much does not exist." Talking to the media through an online presentation, Gandhi said they analysed the voter data of Lok Sabha constituency of Bangalore Central and the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in it from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
According to him, the BJP won the entire Lok Sabha seat with 6,58,915, while the Congress won the entire seat with 6,26,208 votes. Gandhi pointed out that while the Congress won six out of seven segments, it lost in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in which it was defeated by over 1,14,000 votes.
He asserted that the constituency had "vote chori" of 1,00,250 votes, including 11,965 duplicate voters in a single assembly segment, 40,009 voters with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or voters with only one address, 4,132 voters with invalid photos, and 33,692 voters who misused Form 6 of new voters. He claimed that this is a "crime against the Indian Constitution and the Indian flag," and that it is occurring throughout the country. Gandhi said the Congress would like to remind the EC that it is in the business of protecting elections.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the PM with a slender majority and needed to "steal" only 25 seats to stay in power, he said.
The BJP won 25 seats in the Lok Sabha polls with less than 33,000 votes, Gandhi said.
He said the foundation of our Constitution is based on the fact that one person gets one vote.
When we examine polls, the most important consideration is how to secure the "one man, one vote" concept. Are the right people allowed to vote? Are fake people being added? Is the voter list accurate? he said.
The general public has harbored suspicion for some time. Anti-incumbency hits every single party, but the BJP is the only party that does not suffer anti-incumbency in a democratic framework,” he said.
He said that exit polls and internal surveys both go horribly wrong. Gandhi also said that elections are now "choreographed" and take months to conduct, whereas in the past, with little technology, all polls were conducted in the country together. “Not giving machine-readable voter list and disallowing CCTV footage by changing the law convinced us that the EC colluded with the BJP to steal elections,” he claimed.
He also alleged that EC is looking to "destroy" evidence of "vote chori" in the whole country.