'Exit polls show something, results...': Rahul Gandhi says LS polls, Maharashtra elections were rigged
Speaking at a press conference at Congress headquarters in Delhi, Rahul Gandhi claimed that the poll body didn't provide them with the machine-readable voter list, which convinced Congress that the ECI has colluded with the BJP.
Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Thursday reiterated his claims that the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the Maharashtra Assembly polls were rigged, as he launched a scathing attack at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), saying the saffron party does not get affected by anti-incumbency.
Speaking at a press conference at Congress headquarters in Delhi, Gandhi further said that the exit polls and regular polls show something, but the results are always different.
"Anti-incumbency is something that hits every single party in every single democracy. But for some reason, the BJP is the only party in a democratic framework that basically does not suffer from this idea of anti-incumbency," Gandhi said.
"Exit polls, opinion polls saying one thing, you saw in the Haryana election, you saw in the Madhya Pradesh election, and then suddenly the result goes in a completely different direction with massive swings," he alleged.
Gandhi said that the results in Maharashtra confirmed his party's suspicion that the "assembly elections were stolen". He also raised questions over the Election Commission of India (ECI) and alleged that the poll body was working with the BJP to "steal" elections.
He claimed that the poll body didn't provide them with the machine-readable voter list, which convinced Congress that the ECI has colluded with the saffron party.
"We found that between Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha, one crore new voters came into the game. We went to the election commission and wrote this article, and the crux of our argument was that the Maharashtra election was stolen. What is the crux of the problem? Voter list is the property of this country," he said.
"Our people knew that in the polling booths, no such thing happened. There was no massive voting after 5.30 pm. These two things made us believe with reasonable certainty that the Election Commission of India was colluding with the BJP to steal elections," he alleged.
In Karnataka's Mahadevapura assembly seat, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said out of 6.5 lakh votes, there was a 'vote chori' of more than one lakh votes. Gandhi said his party conducted research and found "over one lakh duplicate voters, invalid addresses, bulk voters in Mahadevapura".