New Delhi: The Congress on Monday launched a sharp attack on Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, demanding that the Election Commission (EC) first submit an affidavit in the Supreme Court affirming that its voter list is clean. Only then, the party said, would it file its own affidavit highlighting irregularities in the existing rolls.
The remarks came a day after the CEC gave Congress leader Rahul Gandhi seven days to back his allegations of voter list manipulation with a signed affidavit, warning that failure to do so would render his charges “baseless and invalid.”
At a press conference during the ongoing Voter Adhikar Yatra in Bihar, Congress leader Pawan Khera accused Gyanesh Kumar of “sounding like a BJP spokesperson” rather than a constitutional authority. “We have seen Anurag Thakur and Sambit Patra speak like this, but today we saw the CEC doing the same,” he said.
Kanhaiya Kumar, who joined Khera at the briefing, alleged that the BJP was engaged in “vote chori” (vote theft) and a conspiracy to “steal the Constitution.” He accused the EC of misleading the public by earlier denying irregularities in the voter list but later admitting that corrections were being made under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process.
The Congress leaders claimed multiple irregularities, including instances where dead voters were listed while genuine voters were deleted, and booth-level officers were not properly conducting door-to-door verification. “If EC gives an affidavit that their list is clean, we will also submit an affidavit exposing the flaws,” Kanhaiya Kumar said.
Citing discrepancies in Maharashtra, the Congress alleged massive anomalies between the 2024 Lok Sabha and state polls, such as 40% of voters in some constituencies being shown as missing, while other areas saw a sudden surge of new voters.
The opposition has also reiterated its demand that EC provide voter rolls in a machine-readable format. It has accused the poll body of stonewalling transparency and being “busy highlighting the face of the supreme leader” instead of safeguarding democratic processes.
