New Delhi (TIP): Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Thursday finally dropped the “atom bomb” of “proof” to substantiate his series of allegations against the Election Commission of India facilitating “vote theft” in an Assembly constituency in Karnataka. Addressing a press conference at the AICC headquarters in New Delhi, Gandhi took the reporters through an online presentation of the 2024 Lok Sabha poll data analysed by the Congress to claim that over 1 lakh votes were “stolen” in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in the Lok Sabha constituency of Bangalore Central through five types of manipulation techniques.

“For some time now, there has been suspicion among millions of Indians based on a couple of points. Anti-incumbency is something that hits every single party in every democracy. But the BJP seems to be the only party in a democratic framework that is magically immune to anti-incumbency,” the Congress leader said.

“There is always a reason given by media for this lack of anti-incumbency, for opinion & exit polls going way off the mark, and for huge & unexpected victory margins for BJP. And these reasons are multiple – ‘Ladli Behna’ scheme, Pulwama attack, etc…” he added.

Citing 2024 Lok Sabha poll data, Gandhi pointed out that the BJP secured 6,58,915 votes in the Bangalore Central seat, winning with a margin of 32,707.

“In the Mahadevapura assembly segment, the Congress received 1,15,586 votes, whereas the BJP garnered 2,29,632 votes. The Congress won all the Vidhan Sabhas except Mahadevapura, where the BJP swept and secured a victory margin of 1,14,046 votes. This seat significantly contributed to their election win, and the Lok Sabha result went in their favour on that seat,” he said.

“This discrepancy is a huge imbalance. So, we started examining the details and discovered that approximately 1,00,250 votes were stolen in the Mahadevapura assembly,” he claimed.

Gandhi alleged there was a theft of 1,00,250 votes in the Mahadevapura segment, with 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or single-address voters, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters misusing Form 6 of new voters.

The former Congress President then provided examples for each type of voter manipulation.

Under the ‘duplicate voter’ header, Gandhi claimed that 11,965 such voters were found in the Mahadevapura segment. He cited the example of one Gurkeerat Singh Dang, who appeared on the voters’ list four times at as many different booths.

Gandhi also cited the example of a person named Aditya Srivastava being registered as a voter in three states.

He further cited examples for the 40,009 voters with fake and invalid addresses, showing on screen how several people in the Mahadevapura segment had bizarre entries, such as “dfojgaidf” given as father’s name and “0” as house number.

Under the category of bulk voters or single-address voters, Gandhi cited examples where a single-bedroom house, House number 35, had 80 registered voters. Another similar house, House number 791, had 46 registered voters. Gandhi claimed that when his party workers visited these houses to check and confirm the data, they were either beaten up or threatened.  (ENS)