Dropping his much-awaited "H bomb", the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, today alleged massive vote fraud in the Haryana Assembly polls last year. He alleged that 25 lakh votes were stolen in Haryana, which has a total of 2 crore voters. "This means one in eight voters in Haryana are fake, 12.5 per cent," he said.
Gandhi said several Congress candidates told them after the election that something was wrong. He said all the exit polls had predicted a Congress victory in the Haryana election, but the results threw up a BJP win. He also showed a video of Nayab Singh Saini, BJP leader and Chief Minister, telling the media before the results that "arrangements" had been made and the BJP is winning the polls. "What were these arrangements? This is two days after the election when everybody is saying that the Congress party is sweeping the election. This gentleman is very sure and smiling that the BJP has made arrangements," Gandhi said.
He also said this was the first time in Haryana's history that the postal voting result was opposite to the results in polling booths. "I am questioning the Election Commission and the democratic process in India, and I am doing this with 100 per cent proof. We are sure that a plan was put in motion to convert Congress's landslide victory into a loss," he said.
Gandhi said the Congress lost eight constituencies with very slim margins, including one where it lost by just 32 votes. These margins added up to 22,779. "Congress lost the Haryana election by 22,779 votes, to give you a sense of how close it became," he said.
Citing an example, Gandhi shared 22 entries in the Haryana voter list with a woman's photograph. This is a photograph of a Brazilian model, he said. The photograph can be downloaded for free from a website that deals in stock photos. The Congress leader said this Brazilian woman's photo appears 22 times in the voter list under different names, "Sweety, Seema, Saraswati".
"She votes in 10 different booths in Haryana and she has got multiple names. This means this is a centralised operation," he said.
Citing another case of duplication, he pointed to the 100 voter IDs with the same woman's photograph in a single Assembly segment. "This lady gets to vote 100 times in Haryana if she feels like. This is to create space so that anybody can vote, so that BJP people can move, come from other states and vote," Gandhi said. The Congress leader showed another woman's photograph that appears 223 times in the voter list of two polling booths. "This is the reason the Election Commission destroys CCTV footage of booths," he alleged.
"The Election Commission can remove duplicates in a second. Why don't they do it? Reason: they are helping the BJP," he said, showing several instances of voter IDs with the same pictures but different names in the state's voter list. Gandhi also claimed that 3.5 lakh entries were deleted from Haryana's voter list in the run-up to the polls.
Sources in the Election Commission questioned what polling agents of the Congress were doing on voting day. "They are supposed to object if the elector has already voted or if they doubt the identity of the elector," a source said. The source also asked if Rahul Gandhi supports the Special Intensive Revision aimed at removing duplication from voter lists and striking off names of those who have died or moved from a particular constituency.
The source asked how Gandhi could be sure that all these so-called fake voters voted for the BJP. "If (Congress leader) Pawan Khera has names in the voter lists of two states, is he voting twice?" The source also asked why the Congress did not file objections during the SIR in Bihar.
Union Minister Kiren Rijiju said Rahul Gandhi talks about "fake issues". "Polling is happening in Bihar, yet he's telling stories about Haryana. There's nothing left in Bihar, so he's shifting the narrative to Haryana." The Leader of the Opposition, he said, should speak on serious issues.
"They say they were winning in exit polls and opinion polls. But there's always a difference between poll predictions and actual results. This keeps happening - it's nothing new. We never made any allegations against the Election Commission," he said. Rijiju said the BJP never raises questions when the Opposition parties win elections and asked why the Congress does not question results when it wins polls. He also accused Gandhi of trying to provoke the country's youth, but added that they are with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
