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New Delhi, Nov 5 (IANS) Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday reiterated his charge of voter fraud and alleged that vote theft was not limited to isolated constituencies like Aland and Mahadevapura – as was flagged earlier – but was happening at the national level with the sole intention of ‘benefiting’ the ruling BJP.
He claimed that there was a centralized and systemic approach to destroying the democratic fabric of the country, and that both the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Center were working in collusion to steal not just constituencies but the entire state.
Dropping the ‘H’ file bomb in a detailed press conference, Rahul Gandhi claimed that the entire Haryana election was stolen due to “incompetence or collusion” of the poll panel over duplicate and fake voters.
Citing the example of Brazilian voters who cast their votes in 10 constituencies of Haryana, he claimed that around 25 lakh votes were cast in the state, where the total number of voters is two crore.
He claimed that there were 1.2 lakh entries in Haryana’s voter list where multiple voters shared the same photograph, but the ECI was not using its software to remove them despite having the duly empowered to do so.
He told the press, “Why is the ECI not removing the duplicates? If they remove the duplicates, it will lead to fair elections, which the ECI does not want.”
He also claimed that there were more than 5.21 lakh duplicate entries, and many voters, including BJP officials, are registered in two states – Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
The Congress leader questioned the ECI’s ‘questionable’ handling of the issue of duplicate voters in the voter list and refuted the CEC’s clarification of identifying homeless voters as those with ‘0’ house numbers.
Protesting CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s clarification of declaring the addresses of the homeless as zero, he accused the election panel of deliberately not verifying their addresses and cited ECI rules, which say ground verification is mandatory if there are more than 10 registered voters at an address.
He further claimed that between the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, names of 3.5 lakh voters in the state – about 2 per cent of the electorate – were deleted. He claimed that most of these voters were traditional Congress voters. He also played recorded clips of some voters from the state who supported Rahul Gandhi’s claims.
Stepping up the attack further, the Congress MP claimed that the ECI was working in collusion with the BJP government at the Center and that together they had collaborated in destroying the constitutional structure of the country.
He claimed, “A systematic approach has been adopted to destroy democracy and we believe that Bihar could be its next victim.”
Addressing questions on Congress’s failure to raise these complaints before the elections, Rahul Gandhi said that since the voter list is provided at the last minute, it allows a very short window for the parties to detect discrepancies and take them up with the ECI.
–IANS
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