BJP, EC Silent on Gandhi's Explosive Haryana Vote Theft Claim, Seek Refuge in Invective, Procedure; CITES Red Flags Vantara's Import of Endangered Species; Mamdani's Big Win in NYC

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Snapshot of the day

November 5, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

- ‘In eleven years, Indian elections have gone from Gujarat model to Brazilian model’. (h/t @thecomicproject)

Releasing the so-called ‘hydrogen bomb’ of voter fraud allegations that he had been hinting at over the past few months, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said at a press conference in Delhi on Wednesday that close to 25.4 lakh of Haryana’s two crore registered voters ahead of last year’s assembly elections were fake – comprising 5.2 lakh duplicate entries, 93,174 entries containing invalid addresses and 19.26 lakh electors registered in bulk at various places. Among the allegedly fake voters the Congress discovered in the state’s rolls were 22 persons across ten booths with names like Sweety, Seema and Saraswati who all used the identical photo of a Brazilian model as their own. The Election Commission, he said, has a software that allows it to cull duplicate entries but chose not to do so because “it is helping the BJP”. (Since the press conference, the Brazilian model, Larissa, has confirmed the use of her photograph.)

Alleging that the BJP was involved in voter list manipulation, Gandhi also played a video of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini asserting at a press conference before the election result that the Hindutva party would form the government with a full majority. “There is full vyavastha [arrangement] of it, do not worry,” Saini said in the video. Gandhi pointed to the chief minister’s remarks and said: “Please notice the smile on his face and the word vyavastha. What exactly is he talking about? When all exit polls and indicators showed that the Congress was sweeping the election, this gentleman was very sure and smiling that the BJP had some vyavastha that would reveal itself.” Gandhi also claimed that the system of “vote theft” had been “industrialised”, alleging that similar manipulation would take place in Bihar too. He invited residents of Bihar’s Jamui district to the stage, who said that their names had been deleted from the electoral rolls. The Congress leader alleged that, like them, several genuine voters were removed during the recent special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar.

Gandhi claimed that several BJP members were registered as voters in more than one state. “Thousands of BJP leaders are voting in both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana,” he alleged. “There are people who are BJP leaders in one state and voters in another.”

Watch this important press conference below:

Immediately after his presser the Chief Election Officer of Haryana issued a