Why the Response to Rahul Gandhi’s Accusation of a Stolen Election Is Less Than Convincing
It is necessary to see how news media has responded to the opposition leader’s article and how soon.

Rahul Gandhi. Photo: PTI.
It has taken the Election Commission four months to respond to opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s first disturbing accusation at a press conference in February – that the Commission had somehow managed not to notice that there were 16 lakh more adults on the voters’ list for the Maharashtra assembly elections than the entire adult population of the state, and that while the electorate in the state had increased by 32 lakh persons between the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it had increased by 39 lakhs in five months between the Lok Sabha and assembly elections in 2024.
On June 7, Rahul Gandhi repeated the accusation with elaborations in an editorial page article in the Indian Express. Its responses came in the same newspaper in the form of an elaborate piece by reporters quoting an unnamed official of the Election Commission and a condescending article belittling Rahul Gandhi, by no less important a person than the chief minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis.
That these were published within 24 hours of Gandhi’s article shows that the Indian Express had felt it necessary to submit Gandhi’s letter to the Modi government and had waited for its response before publishing. This extraordinary act of caution from a newspaper widely respected for its courage shows just how severe the pressure from the Modi government on the media has become during the past 11 years.
Since these are separate pieces, I shall deal with their merits separately.
Defending the present system for the constitution of the Election Commission, the piece by three Indian Express writers asks why no previous government did not institutionalise a “more transparent appointment mechanism”. The answer is that till the advent of the Modi government, no previous regime had felt the need to do so. This was because the Chief Election Commissioner was appointed by presidents and prime ministers of India who so deeply respected the letter and the spirit of the Constitution that the possibility that any one of them would conspire with the government in power to gerrymander the result of a Lok Sabha or assembly election had never arisen.
T. Swaminathan was the CEC in 1975 when Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency and in 1977 when, despite having been warned by the Intelligence Bureau that the Congress would lose heavily in the next election she went ahead with it. As P.N. Dhar, her principal secretary in those years, has written in his memoirs, the possibility of continuing the Emergency for another year never arose in her mind.
By the same token, S.L. Shakdher was the CEC when the Congress (I) came roaring back to power in 1980. No one questioned his complete integrity either then or later. Then, T.N. Seshan put an end to booth capturing by splitting the Lok Sabha elections into several phases and getting every polling station guarded by the police or the Central Reserve Police Forces.
The opposition went to the Supreme Court only after it became convinced that Modi was pressuring the Election Commission members to secure decisions from them. This became public knowledge when the next-in-line CEC, Ashok Lavasa, abruptly submitted his resignation to the President of India, to join the Asian Development Bank in August 2020. He did so because he did not agree with the CEC’s exoneration of Modi and home minister Shah from charges of violating the EC’s Model Code of Conduct during their campaigning for the 2019 elections.
It was this blatant discord within the Commission that made the Supreme Court issue its directive in 2023 that future election commissioners had to be selected jointly by the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, and the Chief Justice of India. The Modi government once again treated this directive with contempt, and made a mockery of the Supreme Court directive by passing an amended version that replaced the CJI in the three-member panel of selectors with a minister, pretty much, of the prime minister’s choice.
The Indian Express piece quotes an unnamed ‘senior Election Commission official’, who says: “Now for the first time a law made by Parliament under article 325 is in place for the appointment of the CEC and ECs … now there is consultancy, there is transparency”. This is an insult to anyone who reads the English language. The only “transparency” in the new law is that in the future it shall be the prime minister who will appoint all the members of the Election Commission.
Coming to Rahul Gandhi’s second charge, that 41 lakh new voters were added to the electoral rolls in five months between the Lok Sabha and assembly elections, the lengthy response on Indian Express can be summed up in one sentence: if there has been widespread electoral malpractice, then why did no one from a single opposition party lodge a complaint before the election?
It points out, “[P]olitical parties are involved at every stage of preparing the final electoral roll…Election authorities regularly hold meetings with political parties, provide them free copies of draft and final rolls, and publish these on official websites. During the summary revision period, weekly lists of additions and deletions are shared to allow objections.”
The Election Commission’s website has, in fact, a 24-page detailed report that elaborates upon this process at length.
Ahead of the Maharashtra election, it went on to add, it held discussions with 103,727 representatives of the various parties, of whom 27,099 were from the Congress. The piece does not say “various opposition parties”, so this offers no clarity on how many were from the Maha Vikas Agadi opposition coalition. What this ‘scrutiny’ piece did not say was that even if we assume that half of these representatives – so, 52,000 – were from the MVA, then for this number of representatives to examine the lists of 100,186 polling booths, each MVA representative had to examine current and earlier versions of voters’ lists that contained close to 2,000 names.
Closely comparing current and earlier voting lists for every polling booth, even if comparable lists existed or had been preserved, would have been a mammoth task that few would have been able to accomplish, even if they had considered it necessary. And before the 2024 elections it had never been considered necessary because the nation’s trust in the Election Commission had been complete. This is the trust that the Modi government has shattered.
This loss of faith is justified.
When the Aam Aadmi Party did begin to examine the updated voters’ lists closely after its shock defeat in Delhi, it found that the names added and deleted in 17 out of its 70 constituencies using Form 7 of the Election Commission’s registration forms had shifted an average of 3% of the vote to the BJP. The impact of these additions and deletions can be judged from the fact that the BJP’s winning margin of the vote in Delhi was just 1.99%.
It is not surprising therefore that the EC has so far adamantly ignored the demand for access to all the Form 7s that were used to add or delete voters to and from the electoral lists in Maharashtra.
Finally the paper is silent on Rahul Gandhi’s two most important allegations: How has the voters’ list exceeded the entire adult population of Maharashtra by 16 lakhs, and how did the size of the electorate increase by nearly 41 lakhs in five months from the Lok Sabha elections of 2024 to the assembly elections of 2025, when it had increased by only 31 lakhs in five years from 2019 till 2024 ?
To this, needless to say, the Election commission has given no answer. So I went to Grok, the ‘most advanced’ artificial intelligence system developed in the world so far, for an answer. After surveying each and every election and by-election held in India over the past 75 years, it concluded that the result of the assembly election in Maharashtra “is the biggest mystery in the history of Indian elections”.
This is part one of a two-part series on Rahul Gandhi’s claims on the Maharashtra elections.
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