New Delhi: A day after Rahul Gandhi launched a scathing attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI), accusing it of ‘voter fraud’ in Karnataka and colluding with the BJP to ‘steal elections’, the poll panel dared the Congress leader to sign a formal declaration of his claims or apologise to the nation.
The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha made a power point presentation during a press conference on Thursday and claimed that a deep analysis by a 40-member team of the Congress found duplicacies, fake addresses of voters and false pictures, and suspicious Form 6 applications.
Rahul alleged that the ECI had ‘colluded’ with the BJP to ‘steal’ over 1 lakh votes in the Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency in last year’s general elections.
The ECI dismissed Rahul’s “absurd allegations”, and demanded that Rahul should sign a declaration affirming his charges, or say sorry to Indians.
“If Rahul Gandhi believes in his analysis and believes that his allegations against ECI are true, he should have no problem in signing the Declaration. If Rahul Gandhi does not sign the Declaration, it would mean that he does not believe in his analysis and resultant conclusions and absurd allegations. In which case he should apologise to the nation. Therefore, he has two options: Either sign the Declaration or Apologise to the Nation for raising absurd allegations against ECI,” sources quoted an Election Commission official as saying.
Congress poses 5 questions
Rahul countered the ECI by posing five questions on Friday.
“Instead of threatening us, threatening me, here are five questions for Election Commission… answer these — Why are you not giving voter list in digital machine readable format to the people of India? Why are you destroying video evidence? Why is ECI committing massive fraud in voter lists? Why is ECI threatening the Opposition instead of answering our questions? Finally, why is ECI behaving like an agent of the BJP?”