Rahul Gandhi
VOTER rolls and CCTV footage are tools to be used to strengthen democracy, not ornaments to be locked up. The people of India have a right to be assured that no records have been or will be trashed
In my Parliament speech on February 3, and in a subsequent press conference, I had expressed my disquiet about the conduct of the November 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections. I have doubted the fairness of Indian elections, not every time, not everywhere, but often enough. I am not talking of small-scale cheating, but of industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of our national institutions.
But if some earlier election outcomes seemed odd, the outcome of the 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections is glaringly strange. The scale of rigging was so desperate that, despite all efforts to conceal it, tell-tale evidence has emerged from official statistics, without reliance on any nonofficial source, revealing a step-by-step playbook.
Step 1: Rig the panel for the appointment of umpires
The 2023 Election Commissioners Appointment Act ensured that Election Commissioners are effectively chosen by the Prime Minister and the Home Minister by a 2:1 majority since the third member, the Leader of the Opposition, can always be outvoted. These gentlemen are also the top contestants in the contest whose umpires are being chosen. The decision to place a cabinet minister instead of the Chief Justice on the selection committee does not pass the smell test. Ask yourself, why would someone go out of their way to remove a neutral arbiter in an important institution? To ask the question is to know the answer.
Step 2: Inflate the voter register with fake voters
Election Commission (EC) data show that the number of registered voters in Maharashtra in the 2019 Vidhan Sabha elections was 8.98 crore, which rose five years later to 9.29 crore for the May 2024 Lok Sabha elections. But a mere five months later, by the November 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections, the number had leaped to 9.70 crore. A crawl of 31 lakh in five years, then a leap of 41 lakh in just five months. So incredible was this leap that the registered voter total of 9.70 crore was even greater than the 9.54 crore adults in Maharashtra according to the government’s own estimates.
Step 3: Inflate voter turnout figures on top of an inflated voter base
To most participants and observers, voting day in Maharashtra appeared to be completely normal. As they do elsewhere, voters queued up, voted and went home. Those voters who had entered polling booths by 5 pm were permitted to stay until they had voted. There were no reports of unusually long queues or crowding at any voting booth.
But according to the EC, voting day was far more dramatic. The polling turnout at 5 pm was 58.22 per cent. Even after voting closed, however, turnout kept increasing more and more. The final turnout was reported only the next morning to be 66.05 per cent. This unprecedented 7.83 percentage point increase is equivalent to 76 lakh voters — much higher than previous Vidhan Sabha elections in Maharashtra (see table).
Step 4: Pinpoint targeted bogus voting turned BJP into Bradman
There are yet more anomalies. There are about 1 lakh booths in Maharashtra, but most added voters were targeted in only about 12,000 booths across 85 constituencies in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had performed poorly in the last Lok Sabha elections. That’s an average of over 600 voters at each booth after 5 pm. Optimistically assuming that each voter needs a minute to vote, voting would need to continue for 10 hours. Since this never happened, it begs the question — how were the extra votes cast? Not surprisingly, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won most of these 85 seats.
The EC described the sharp increase in voters as “a welcome trend in participation of youth”. Apparently, the welcome trend was restricted to 12,000 booths and not the remaining 88,000. This would be an amusing joke, if it were not tragic.
One such seat — Kamthi — serves as a typical case study. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the Indian National Congress (INC) polled 1.36 lakh votes in Kamthi while the BJP polled 1.19 lakh votes. In the 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections, the INC polled 1.34 lakh, a roughly similar number to its earlier performance. But the BJP’s score jumped to 1.75 lakh, an increase of 56,000. This jump came from the bank of 35,000 new voters added in Kamthi between the two elections. It appears almost all voters who had not voted in the Lok Sabha and almost all the 35,000 new additions were magnetically drawn to the BJP. It is not hard to discern the lotus shape of the magnet.
Consequent to steps one to four above, the BJP bagged 132 out of the 149 seats it contested in the 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections, a strike rate of 89 per cent, far beyond what it has scored any time or anywhere. In comparison, the BJP’s strike rate in the Lok Sabha elections only five months earlier had been 32 per cent.
Step 5: Conceal the evidence trail
The EC has met all Opposition queries with silence and even aggression. It summarily dismissed requests to make available voter rolls with photos for the 2024 Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections.
Even worse, only one month after the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections, and following a High Court order directing the EC to share videography and CCTV footage of voting in a polling station, the central government — after consulting the EC — amended the 1961 Conduct of Election Rules Section 93(2)(a) to restrict access to CCTV footage and electronic records. The amendment itself, and its timing, are both giveaways. The recent exposure of identical/duplicate EPIC numbers has heightened concerns about bogus voters, although this is likely the tip of the iceberg.
Voter rolls and CCTV footage are tools to be used to strengthen democracy, not ornaments to be locked up while democracy is violated. The people of India have a right to be assured that no records have been or will be trashed. There exists an apprehension in many quarters that evidence of other fraudulent practices like targeted voter deletion and/or booth displacement may emerge from the examination of records. There is apprehension that this election rigging playbook has been in play for years. Doubtless, the examination of records will also throw up the modus operandi and the cast of complicit characters. However, the Opposition and the public are blocked at every turn from accessing these records.
It is not hard to guess why rigging in Maharashtra in November 2024 took on such desperate proportions. But rigging is like match-fixing — the fixing side might win a game, but irreparable damage is done to institutions and to people’s faith in the result.
Match-fixed elections are a poison for any democracy.
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The writer is Senior Congress Leader and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha
C. Indian Express
