Raipur
The Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee has called on the Election Commission of India (ECI) to respond to allegations of massive manipulation in electoral rolls. The party’s state president, Deepak Baij, said that these concerns were highlighted by senior party leader Rahul Gandhi, who presented evidence of widespread irregularities in voter lists during a press conference in New Delhi on 7 August 2025.
Talking to media on Sunday, Baij said the evidence shared by Gandhi stemmed from an independent investigation into the electoral rolls of the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency. The Congress leader had pointed out that while his party won six of the seven assembly segments in the 2024 general election, the BJP secured a victory in the Mahadevapura assembly segment by a massive margin, which helped them win the parliamentary seat. He alleged that over 1,00,250 votes were manipulated in this one segment alone.
Baij cited five types of manipulation found in the Mahadevapura electoral rolls:
- Duplicate voters: 11,965 duplicate names were found on the list.
- Fake addresses: 40,009 voters were registered with fake or non-existent addresses.
- High density of voters at a single address: 10,452 voters were registered at addresses with an unusually large number of names.
- Invalid photographs: 4,132 entries had blurry or tiny photographs.
- Misuse of Form 6: 33,692 fake names were added by misusing Form 6, meant for new voters.
According to Baij, the investigation revealed serious negligence by the ECI. He gave the example of one person, Gurkeerat Singh Dang, listed four times with different EPIC IDs in the same assembly segment. Another voter, Aditya Srivastava, was registered in Mahadevapura, Mumbai, and Lucknow with the same EPIC ID. He said thousands of entries had addresses listed as ‘0’, ‘-‘, or other non-existent details, and an investigation found that one small room had 80 voters registered to it, but no one was living there.
The state Congress president said if the manipulated votes from Mahadevapura were removed, Congress candidate Mansoor Ali Khan would have defeated BJP’s P.C. Mohan by 82,000 votes. However, the alleged theft of 1,00,250 votes in Mahadevapura resulted in the BJP winning the seat by 32,707 votes.
Baij said these irregularities were not isolated incidents and pointed to a larger pattern of electoral manipulation. He mentioned the 2024 Haryana assembly elections where the Congress lost eight seats by a margin of just 22,779 votes, allowing the BJP to form a government with a slim majority. In the 2024 Maharashtra assembly elections, he said nearly 41 lakh new names were added to the voter list in the five months leading up to the election, exceeding the state’s adult population. He also said there was an abnormal jump in voting percentages after 5 pm on polling day. He pointed out that the BJP won 25 Lok Sabha seats in 2024 with a victory margin of less than 33,000 votes, which was the exact number of seats needed to secure a majority.
Baij accused the ECI of trying to suppress the truth. He said the commission changed its rules to restrict public access to CCTV footage and ordered that video evidence be destroyed within 45 days. The ECI also denied the Congress party’s request for a machine-readable voter list in Maharashtra, stating it was “unacceptable”.
Baij said the ECI’s response to Mr. Gandhi’s press conference was part of this pattern. The Karnataka and Maharashtra state election commissions have asked the opposition leader to provide documented proof with an affidavit. He said the burden of proof now lies with the ECI, not the opposition, given the evidence presented by Gandhi.
To restore its credibility, the Congress leader said the ECI must immediately act on two demands:
- Make machine-readable voter data public.
- Make all CCTV footage related to the election process public.
