Rahul Gandhi has accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of planning “vote chori” and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of implementing it on the ground, in the sharpest escalation yet of the Congress leader’s campaign against alleged electoral fraud. The Rahul Gandhi vote chori charge was levelled at the concluding rally of the Congress’s “Save Goa” yatra in Goa on Saturday.
Addressing a public meeting at the Margao Cricket Association ground after a two-kilometre march with party workers, Gandhi said: “I keep saying that vote theft has taken place in India. The one who planned it fully was Prime Minister Modi, the one who designed it was Amit Shah, and the one who implemented it on the ground was Gyanesh Kumar. For the mistake they have made, all three will certainly be punished. They cannot escape.”
Gandhi claimed that 45 defamation cases had been filed against him through people close to Modi and Shah, but said no case had been filed in court over his vote-chori allegation — because, he argued, a full legal trial would lead to the Prime Minister being “caught”.
Gandhi, who is the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has made the Rahul Gandhi vote chori allegation a centrepiece of the Congress’s attack on the BJP government. The party has held a series of press conferences and public meetings around the claim in recent months, presenting what it says is documentary evidence of irregularities in voter lists.
Rahul Gandhi Vote Chori Claim: The Evidence Cited
Gandhi said the Congress had proved with evidence that the Rahul Gandhi vote chori allegation was grounded in documented irregularities across seven states: Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Assam.
According to Gandhi, votes of opposition supporters had been deleted from electoral rolls while votes favourable to the ruling party had been added. He said the Rahul Gandhi vote chori charge reflected a systematic pattern of deletion and addition, and urged Congress workers to remain highly vigilant during elections to guard against such manipulation.
Gandhi has made the Rahul Gandhi vote chori allegation repeatedly in recent months. The Election Commission has previously rejected the Congress’s claims of voter-roll manipulation, maintaining that electoral rolls are prepared transparently — a position Gandhi dismissed at the Goa rally.
Rahul Gandhi Vote Chori Charge Reaches Goa
The Rahul Gandhi vote chori offensive came at the end of the “Save Goa” yatra, a campaign aimed at strengthening the Congress’s base in all 40 assembly constituencies ahead of next year’s Goa assembly elections.
Turning to the BJP-ruled state, Gandhi said unemployment in Goa had reached its peak and that the state’s youth were being forced to seek work in other countries. He contrasted the BJP’s old boast of a “Gujarat model” with what he called a corruption-tainted “Goa model”, predicting the Congress would defeat the BJP and form the next government in the state.
The rally marked the culmination of a yatra that took Gandhi and Congress workers through the coastal state, where the party is seeking to rebuild its organisation. The Rahul Gandhi vote chori message, party leaders believe, resonates with voters who harbour doubts about the fairness of recent elections — a theme the Congress intends to carry into the assembly polls due next year.
Rahul Gandhi Vote Chori Campaign and the Education Critique
In a separate intervention, Gandhi released a video on social media on Sunday of a recent interaction with students, in which he described India’s education system as an “exclusion system” designed to push crores of young people out of learning opportunities.
The twin interventions — the Goa broadside and the critique of the education system — underline the opposition leader’s strategy of pairing institutional criticism with a direct political attack on the Prime Minister ahead of a series of state elections.