Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Saturday called Rahul Gandhi's claims of election rigging in Maharashtra a predictable script which the Congress follows after losing elections and paints itself as a "victim of an imaginary system".
The rebuttal comes after Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, kicked off a political storm with an op-ed in the Indian Express, in which he laid a number of allegations against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) over the Maharashtra election results as part of a "match-fixing" ploy which he claimed will happen in Bihar elections as well.
'Congress a victim of imaginary system'
"Rahul Gandhi’s post on Maharashtra elections is nothing more than a predictable script—lose elections, discredit institutions, fabricate conspiracies, and portray himself as a victim of an imaginary system. But India’s democracy is far stronger than the insecurities of a dynast who refuses to accept repeated electoral verdicts," Pradhan wrote in a post on X.
"If there’s any rigging Rahul Gandhi should be worried about, it’s the kind his own party mastered for decades—from the Emergency to misusing Article 356 over 90 times to dismiss opposition governments," he added.
Modi government reformed election process: Pradhan
The Union minister further recalled Gandhi's remarks at Cambridge University that "Indian democracy is dead", saying yet the Congress MP "participates in elections, campaigns freely, and blames EVMs only when he loses".
"As for the Election Commission, it was the Modi government that reformed the process by including the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the panel—an inclusion that didn’t exist for decades when Congress ruled. So who's really safeguarding democracy?
He concluded by suggesting that Gandhi should introspect and that "match-fixing isn’t when you lose badly; it’s when you try to discredit the umpire because the public refuses to vote for you."
What Rahul Gandhi said
In the op-ed, the Congress MP claimed that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) used a five-step blueprint to undermine the democratic process in Maharashtra.
"Step 1: Rig the panel for appointing the Election Commission, step 2: Add fake voters to the roll, step 3: Inflate voter turnout, step 4: Target the bogus voting exactly where BJP needs to win, step 5: Hide the evidence,” Gandhi wrote in a social media post alongside a clip of his article," he wrote, adding that a similar move would be coming in Bihar elections also later this year.