At a press conference on August 7, 2025, during a presentation, Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition (LOP) in the Lok Sabha, accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of 'criminal fraud' and collusion with the BJP to steal elections. He said that some 1,00,250 fake votes were created in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha Constituency to ensure a win for the BJP in the last general election. Later in the evening at his official residence, he made the presentation before 50 representatives of 25 political parties, showing 'bulletproof evidence of vote theft' in the Karnataka Lok Sabha constituency.

He claimed that a team of 40 people spent six months going through the physical electoral rolls given by the ECI that were seven feet thick and presented in a non-machine-readable format. He accused "the ECI was colluding with the BJP to steal elections" and that is the reason why it refuses to give the machine-readable data and the CCTV footage, fearing exposing the fraud.

He provided the breakdown of how the votes were stolen in five different ways: 11,965 duplicate votes, 40,009 fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters in a single address, 4,132 invalid photos, and 33,692 Form 6 misuse. The Form 6 meant for first-time voters was misused to include even nonagenarians.

This is the first time in the electoral history of India that any political party has come out with such shocking, startling revelations of electoral fraud, hard documentary evidence, and made serious allegations against the ECI. The following day, August 8, some 300 MPs started a march from the parliament complex to the ECI's Office protesting against the 'vote chori' (vote theft); they were prevented by the security forces from marching towards the ECI's Office.

One expected the ECI to investigate the charges made by the LOP and the Opposition. Instead, the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar held a press conference on Sunday, August 17 – the day Rahul Gandhi, along with the INDIA bloc leaders, including the RJD leader Tejaswi Yadav, started a 16-day 'Voter Adhikar Yatra' in Bihar. The CEC did not answer the charges. He gave a bizarre reason that the CCTV footage cannot be shared to protect the privacy of mothers, sisters, etc.

He accused the Opposition of misleading the people with disinformation. He gave an ultimatum to Rahul Gandhi to file an affidavit under oath within seven days or apologise to the nation. He spoke more like a rival politician rather than an independent, impartial, neutral umpire entrusted with the responsibility of conducting free and fair elections, ensuring the integrity of the electoral rolls.

The Opposition reacted: "The EC stands thoroughly exposed, not only for its incompetence but also for the blatant partisanship. Rather than addressing substantive issues, the CEC dismissed the legitimate complaints, deflected accountability and blamed the Opposition."

The CEC did not answer why the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is conducted in Bihar, in such great haste, just a few months before the Assembly election. Rahul Gandhi called the SIR an "institutionalised chori (theft) to deny the poor their right to vote."

The ECI's refusal to provide the list of 65 lakh voters deleted, following the SIR, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Baghchi in its order dated August 14, directed the ECI to publish the list of all the 65 lakh voters, giving reasons for the deletion such as death, migration, untraceability, and duplication for each exclusion on the draft rolls published on August 1, and to accept the Aadhaar card as identify proof, which it was refusing to accept, from deleted voters applying for inclusion.

The bench observed that the "people have a right to know. A high degree of transparency is required to inspire voters' confidence" in the election process. It directed the ECI to give wide publicity to the uploading of booth-wise lists of deleted names on the websites of the chief electoral officer and the district electoral officer and display the printed list in panchayat and block offices by issuing advertisements in vernacular and English newspapers. This is a serious indictment of the ECI.

Surprisingly, the deleted list after the SIR does not contain the names of infiltrators from Bangladesh, etc. The Home Minister Amit Shah and other BJP spokespersons had defended the ECI, claiming that the purpose of the SIR is to detect foreigners and delete their names from the electoral rolls and deport them. The claim has turned out to be false and politically motivated, raising serious doubts about the motive behind the SIR exercise.

And while the ECI insists on Rahul Gandhi filing an affidavit, the SP leader Akilesh Yadav had distributed on August 18 to the pressmen in the Parliament complex copies of the affidavits submitted by his party to the ECI on November 10, 2022, complaining that some 18,000 voters were removed from the voters' lists during the UP-Assembly polls. No action is taken by the ECI on the complaints. It is obvious that the demand for an affidavit from Rahul Gandhi is a diversionary tactic to shirk its constitutional responsibility, particularly when Rahul Gandhi says that the documents analysed are the ones provided by the ECI itself.

The partisan approach of Gyanesh Kumar is evident. While he asked the LOP Rahul Gandhi to file an affidavit under oath to prove his charges, he was silent on Anurag Thakur, the BJP Lok Sabha member, who made similar charges of electoral fraud, intended to corner the Opposition. Like Gandhi, Thakur alleged the presence of fake voters, duplication of names, mass additions, doubtful addresses and dubious first-time voters in voter lists, and the misuse of government machinery to engineer these discrepancies.

The difference was that Thakur picked six constituencies won by the Opposition leaders to make his case – Lok Sabha Constituencies of Wayanad, Diamond Harbour, Kannauj, Rae Bareli, Manipur, and Kolathur Assembly constituency, and repeatedly drew attention to the names of the so-called doubtful voters, all Muslims. He was making a long leap of his own – on the back of a communal dog whistle politics. Nonetheless, it was the incrimination of the ECI.

The former CEC OP Rawat, in an interview with Preeti Chaudhary of India Today TV (August 18), said that the CEC Gyanesh Kumar should not have politicised the issue and instead addressed the charges made by the LOP and the Opposition to defuse the crisis and that the CEC press conference did not defuse the crisis.

When asked why the CEC did not answer the questions raised by Rahul Gandhi and the Opposition, Rawat said that there is no such thing as the zero house number and that the CEC should have initiated an inquiry into the charges immediately and that the initiative is lost. Further, the CCTVs are installed only to ensure transparency of the election process, and the privacy issue is irrelevant.

Another former CEC, SY Quraishi, in his article A test of trust (The Indian Express, August 20, 2025), argues:

"Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of a democracy, and the electoral roll is its very foundation. Without an accurate, inclusive and credible roll, the process risks being undermined at the very start. The Supreme Court has repeatedly underscored this, holding that free and fair elections form part of the basic structure of the Constitution, and that accurate voter lists are integral to that process. What was valid till 2024 has suddenly become wrong. Were the Commissions in the last two decade less wise? The trust the ECI once commanded almost unquestionably is now under greater public scrutiny...citizens should not depend on intermediaries or political agents to know whether their names were removed. Public access is fundamental to democratic accountability."

Both the former CECs disapproved of the manner in which Gyanesh Kumar, the present CEC, is conducting himself. That the ECI is not functioning as an impartial neutral umpire, despite being an independent constitutional body, is a matter of serious concern. The way the public institutions, such as the ED, CBI, IT Dept, and now the ECI, to name a few, are functioning, and surrendering their autonomy, preferring to toe the line of the ruling party, demonstrates how the people indoctrinated by a particular ideology have infiltrated public institutions, affecting their neutrality.

It is a larger malaise afflicting society. How is it that the bureaucrats, who worked for so long under the various Congress governments before 2014, and observed the principle of political neutrality, are now displaying bias, openly associating with the extreme right-wing regime, becoming its willing partners in its various acts of 'criminal fraud'?

It is because under the Congress liberal governments, their political prejudice and communal mindset remained wrapped. And now, with the advent of the Hindutva regime, they find themselves emboldened, bringing out into the open their true colour - corrupt, dishonest and communal- and the jaundiced view of the world - the real illiberal mindset.

So, what is important is appointing upright people in civil services, who would function fearlessly and discharge their duties impartially, irrespective of their political affiliation and party or parties in power. The courage to be impersonal is a rare ethical value in public service. And no amount of reforms will make a difference, unless the people running the public institutions are people of honesty and integrity and willing to defend the integrity of the institutions they serve.

That the institutions like the election commission are imploding is an indication that today we do not have people of moral integrity at the helm of public affairs. That explains why even the constitutional guarantee of independence of public institutions is getting increasingly repugnant and redundant.

The vote theft puts democracy in peril. Parakala Prabhakar, an economist and political commentator, author of the book The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis, husband of the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in a YouTube News Channel, claimed that in the Lok Sabha election 2024, the NDA-BJP had benefited by 79 seats due to electoral fraud. Had it not been so, the INDIA bloc would have secured 316 seats, instead of 237, and the NDA-BJP would have ended up with 213 seats as against 292, implying the present NDA government was formed by stealing the people's mandate.

The ECI, the custodian of democracy, is partisan and acting like an 'agent' of the ruling party, compromising the institutional integrity. The entire Opposition, for the first time in the parliamentary history of India, is united against the high-handedness of the CEC Gyanesh Kumar and his unwillingness to inquire into the serious charges of electoral malpractices. The Opposition lost trust in the CEC. No wonder the Opposition is contemplating moving a no-confidence motion against him.