A day ahead of the first phase of polling in Bihar, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday launched yet another round of allegations against the Centre and the Election Commission, claiming widespread malpractices in the 2024 Haryana assembly elections.
Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters in New Delhi, Gandhi released documents which he dubbed as “H Files” and “proof” of massive rigging of Haryana polls.
Gandhi, the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, claimed that the Congress would have swept the state if the “vote theft" had not taken place, and alleged that the saffron party ensured its victory through “fake votes" and “manipulation of postal ballots”.
“I want Gen-Z to take this seriously, because your future is being taken away from you,” he said.
Giving further details on his charges, Gandhi displayed the photo of a Brazilian model whose image, he said, had appeared 22 times under different names in the voter list.
“Who is this lady? She votes 22 times in Haryana, in 10 different booths. She has multiple names—Seema, Sweety, Saraswati, Rashmi, Vilma... " he said and termed it as part of a centralised operation.
“The lady is a Brazilian model. That’s a stock photograph, and she is one of 25 lakh such records in Haryana," he claimed.
Stepping up his attack on the Election Commission, the Congress MP said the poll body was working at the behest of the ruling BJP.
He said 25 lakh fake voters had been listed in Haryana, which had a total electorate of about two crore.
“That means one in every eight voters is fake — 12.5%. This includes 5.21 lakh duplicate voters, 93,174 invalid voters, and 19.26 lakh bulk voters,” Gandhi said.
Gandhi had earlier alleged malpractices and vote theft in the Karnataka and Maharashtra Assembly elections. He also claimed that centralised software had been used for “mass deletion” of names from the voters’ list in several states.
In the Aland constituency in Karnataka, Gandhi said, 6,018 applications were filed impersonating voters, for deletion of names from the list.
In Maharashtra's Rajura constituency, voters were added in a fraudulent manner using automated software, he alleged.
The poll panel has, however, dismissed his allegations as "incorrect and baseless".