Congress member and Lok Sabha Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday warned that Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar would be put in jail for "treason" for alleged vote theft during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah would face "legal action".
Speaking at the INDIA bloc's mega 'Dillo Chalo' rally at Ramlila Maidan, he hailed the turnout, calling it the "voice of youth, farmers, labourers" against the alleged vote theft amid the SIR.
"Amit Shah said Narendra Modi is not going anywhere. I would tell you Narendra Modi cannot go anywhere; even if he wants to go, we will not let him," he said at the rally, alongside key Opposition leaders like Mamata Banerjee, Mallikarjun Kharge, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, and K.C. Venugopal.
He also repeated the INDIA bloc's allegation that the BJP had manipulated voting across elections in Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, as well as the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The BJP launched a sharp counter-attack to Rahul Gandhi's claims on the turnout, with Puri MP and the party's national spokesperson Sambit Patra claiming that the Ramlila Maidan rally had failed.
"Out of 28,000 chairs, around 5,000-7,000 were empty at 3:30-4 PM. This is the reality behind Congress's claim of 10 lakh attendees," he told the media, calling the Opposition rally a "spectacle of chaos".
Patra also disputed claims of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls being rigged, saying that Gyanesh Kumar was not even in the picture at the time, as he only became the CEC in 2025. He also questioned why the INDIA bloc leaders had not challenged the 2024 result in court over the past two years.
"If the 2024 election was illegal, then Rahul Gandhi is also an illegal Leader of Opposition, and all his MPs are illegal. If an election is illegal, challenge it in court ... You cannot declare an election illegal two and a half years later at Ramlila Maidan," he pointed out.
