Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Tuesday launched a sharp attack on the Election Commission, alleging large-scale voter fraud in the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections. Gandhi claimed that around 25 lakh votes were fake, amounting to nearly 12.5% of the state’s total electorate of two crore.

Calling it a “theft of democracy,” Gandhi said that “one in every eight voters in Haryana is fake.” He accused the BJP government of orchestrating the fraud, asserting that the Congress’s projected victory was overturned through manipulation.

“All exit polls predicted a clear win for Congress. Yet the results were completely opposite,” he said at a press briefing, showing a video of Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini stating, before the results, that the BJP had made “arrangements” to win. “What kind of arrangements was he referring to?” Gandhi asked.

He also pointed out that, for the first time, postal ballot results contradicted the polling booth outcomes, calling it “statistical proof” of tampering. “We have 100% evidence that a plan was executed to turn Congress’s majority into a defeat,” he claimed.

Gandhi said the Congress lost eight seats by razor-thin margins, including one by just 32 votes, with the total difference across those constituencies adding up to 22,779 votes.

As evidence, he displayed examples of voter list duplication, showing a Brazilian model’s stock photo appearing 22 times under different names like “Sweety,” “Seema,” and “Saraswati.” Another woman’s photo, he claimed, appeared 100 times in one constituency and 223 times in another. “This is not coincidence—it’s a centralised operation to enable fake voting,” he alleged.

He further accused the Election Commission of deleting 3.5 lakh genuine entries ahead of the polls and destroying CCTV footage from polling booths to conceal evidence. “The Commission can easily remove duplicate voters using technology but chooses not to because it helps the BJP,” Gandhi said.

However, Election Commission sources dismissed the allegations, asking why Congress’s polling agents failed to object to suspicious voting on election day. They also questioned Gandhi’s assumption that all so-called fake voters supported the BJP, adding that voter list revisions regularly remove duplicates and ineligible names.

Union Minister Kiren Rijiju hit back, saying Gandhi was “manufacturing fake issues” to divert attention from the ongoing Bihar elections. “There’s nothing left for him in Bihar, so he’s spinning tales about Haryana,” Rijiju said. He accused Gandhi of trying to provoke youth with baseless claims, asserting that “the people are with Prime Minister Modi.”