Rahul Gandhi Confronts Election Commission With Clear Proof of Voter List Fraud; Modi's Tariff Options; Catechism for a True Indian

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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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable

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Snapshot of the day

August 7, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi today accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of colluding with the BJP to perpetuate voter fraud on a massive scale in order to swing the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in favour of the saffron party. At a press conference, he alleged that in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura Assembly constituency alone, there were discrepancies in 1,00,250 names in the electoral roll. Gandhi said that out of these, there were 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 voters with fake or invalid addresses, 10,454 “bulk voters” registered in a single address, 4,132 voters with invalid photographs and 33,692 voters in whose cases there had allegedly been misuse of Form 6. The EC’s Form 6 is an application document for registering new voters. Mahaedevapura is part of the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency, which the BJP’s PC Mohan won last year.

Gandhi alleged that the Election Commission deliberately does not give political parties electronic data on voter lists as it does not want them to scrutinise the document carefully. He claimed that it took the Congress six months to identify discrepancies in the voter list of just the Mahadevapura Assembly segment. “If the Election Commission had given us electronic data, it would have taken only 30 seconds,” he remarked. The leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said that the papers also do not support optical character recognition, which would have allowed for data to be extracted by scanning them. The ECI is yet to respond to these serious allegations by Gandhi.

The Election Commission’s UP CEO tried to challenge Gandhi’s claims in regard to one voter, Aditya Srivastava, who is listed as a voter (with the same unique voter ID number) in Bangalore but also in Lucknow and Maharashtra. The UP CEO said this Srivastava was not found in Lucknow’s list but fact-checker Mohammad Zubair quickly confirmed that he very much was.

With US President Donald Trump's 25% ‘reciprocal’ tariff on India technically kicking in today and as the clock ticks on the further 25% levy he announced yesterday – meant to penalise New Delhi's steady purchases of Russian oil –