Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Wednesday accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of orchestrating a large-scale conspiracy to “steal” the Congress’s mandate in last year’s Haryana assembly elections. Speaking to reporters just a day before the first phase of the Bihar assembly polls, Gandhi alleged systemic manipulation of voter rolls, irregularities in counting, and postal ballot discrepancies that he claimed ensured a BJP victory in the state.

Gandhi said his party had collected what he termed “crystal-clear proof” that nearly 2.5 million votes in Haryana were either deleted, duplicated, or otherwise manipulated to favor the BJP. Highlighting one extreme example, he claimed a Brazilian model’s photograph was used multiple times under different names—“Seema, Sweety, and Saraswati”—across ten polling booths in the Rai assembly constituency. “This is being done in a systematic way, not randomly,” Gandhi asserted, accusing the ECI of becoming an active participant in the manipulation rather than remaining a neutral arbiter of the elections.

He also drew parallels with the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls in Bihar, bringing on stage five individuals from Jamui district whose names had been removed from the electoral rolls. Gandhi suggested that the same system of deletion and manipulation that he alleges occurred in Haryana was being “industrialized” and deployed in other states, including Bihar. “The voters list comes to us at the last minute, so we cannot detect it earlier,” he said.

The Congress leader categorized the discrepancies in Haryana’s rolls into several types: duplicate entries, invalid or false addresses, bulk registrations, and unexplained voter additions. According to Gandhi, over 2.5 million voters were unaccounted for in the official rolls, and despite repeated requests, the ECI allegedly refused to run existing software designed to detect duplicate entries. “The system exists to catch duplicates,” he said, “but it is not being used because it would expose what has been done.”

Gandhi went further to question postal ballot results, claiming that they diverged unusually from Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) counts. Of the 80,105 postal ballots cast in Haryana, he noted, 41,417 went to the Congress and 27,952 to the BJP, a distribution that he said was inconsistent with the broader voting trends. “For the first time in Haryana’s history, postal ballot tallies differed from the votes cast on EVMs,” he said, suggesting manipulation. He also alleged that thousands of BJP workers exploited duplicate registrations to vote in both Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

Adding a vivid anecdote to illustrate his claims, Gandhi described the use of a woman’s photograph—actually a Brazilian model—for multiple fraudulent votes, emphasizing the scale and audacity of the alleged malpractice. He further questioned the logic behind voter entries listed with “house number zero,” suggesting that it rendered the voters untraceable once they had cast their votes. According to the ECI, these entries typically represent citizens living in homes without official numbers or homeless individuals. Gandhi countered that his team verified several addresses and found voters residing in identifiable homes had been categorized under “house number zero,” making them effectively untraceable in the system.

Gandhi said the Congress had compiled what he termed the “H-Files,” a collection of data and evidence showing how results in Haryana were allegedly reversed. “We suspected this was not happening in just a few constituencies but across the state, and perhaps nationally,” he claimed, adding that irregularities were reported in nearly every assembly seat. He noted that the Congress lost by 22,779 votes, a margin he described as directly connected to the alleged manipulation of 25 lakh voters. “One in eight voters in Haryana are fake, and despite that the Congress lost narrowly,” he said. He framed the controversy as part of a broader political struggle, accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah of participating in what he called a “theft of democracy.”

The allegations echo Gandhi’s previous claims of electoral malpractice. In August, he alleged 100,250 “stolen” votes in the Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bangalore, suggesting that the ECI colluded with the ruling party. In September, he claimed attempts to delete names of voters in Karnataka’s Aland constituency and add “fake voters” in Maharashtra’s Rajura constituency. In both instances, the ECI dismissed his allegations as unfounded, and the BJP characterized them as attempts to distract from the Congress’s poor electoral performance.

The ECI responded promptly to Gandhi’s latest claims, labeling them “unfounded.” Officials noted that no appeals or objections were filed during Haryana’s electoral process, and only 22 election petitions were pending across 90 assembly constituencies. “Haryana: zero appeals against electoral rolls,” the ECI said in a statement, underscoring that candidates and political parties had ample opportunity to raise concerns during polling.

The BJP dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as “false and baseless,” accusing him of attempting to tarnish the reputation of the ECI to mask Congress failures. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju remarked, “If there is any irregularity with the voting, it must be flagged with the EC or addressed in court. Rahul Gandhi never did this.” BJP leaders emphasized that the Congress’s losses in the Haryana assembly elections were the result of internal infighting, a lackluster campaign, and mismanagement of caste-based vote dynamics, not voter fraud.

Despite these rebuttals, Gandhi pressed his narrative of widespread irregularities. He claimed that 350,000 voters were removed from Haryana’s rolls without proper notice, disproportionately affecting communities that traditionally support the Congress. He accused the ECI of ignoring repeated requests to employ technology to detect duplicates, alleging deliberate inaction. “It is not my problem if the voter list is wrong. It is the EC who has to guarantee voter list integrity,” he said, asserting that the Commission repeatedly shifted the burden onto political parties.

During his presentation, Gandhi invited public scrutiny of the ongoing SIR process in Bihar. Five individuals from Jamui district, including a man in a wheelchair, testified that their names had been removed under the pretext of “absence,” reinforcing Gandhi’s argument that deletions were widespread and potentially politically motivated.

The ECI, however, pushed back on these claims, questioning whether Gandhi opposed or supported SIR itself, which is designed to remove duplicate, dead, or relocated voters and to verify citizenship. Officials also noted that polling and booth-level agents of the Congress did not raise objections during voting or counting, suggesting that any discrepancies should have been reported through official channels at the time.

The controversy comes just ahead of Bihar’s assembly polls, where voter roll revisions and deletions have also become a point of contention. Gandhi framed his allegations as a broader call for youth and citizens to safeguard democracy using peaceful means. “Gen Z and youth have the power to restore our democracy with satya and ahimsa,” he said, appealing to voters to resist what he described as a “wholesale theft of democracy” and a “murder of the Constitution.”

As the debate unfolds, the Haryana episode illustrates the growing tensions between political parties and the Election Commission, especially in the context of technological interventions like SIR. It also underscores the high stakes of narrow-margin elections, where allegations of voter manipulation—whether substantiated or not—can shape public perception and electoral discourse months after ballots are cast.