On his current visit to the United States, Congress leader and Lok Sabha's Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi has expressed grave apprehensions regarding the purity of India's electoral process.
In a talk with Indian diaspora members in Boston, he blamed the Election Commission of India (ECI) for its inability to perform its functions and for being dictated to by outside forces.
In his speech, Gandhi referenced claimed discrepancies during the Maharashtra Assembly polls as one big warning sign.
"More voters participated in the Maharashtra Assembly elections than exist on the electoral rolls," Gandhi stated, bringing to light what he termed a frightening disparity.
He went on to clarify, "The Election Commission informed us with a number at 5.30 in the evening. And from 5.30 to 7.30 p.m., 65 lakh more votes were polled. That is physically not possible to handle in two hours."
Gandhi doubted the feasibility of handling such a huge number of voters in such a limited time frame.
This would imply there were lines of voters going into the early hours of the morning. We brought this to the attention of the Election Commission, requested video footage, but they would not give it to us. It was extremely obvious to us that the Commission was compromised."
He stressed that this was not an isolated issue but part of a wider trend of institutional decay.
“There is something very wrong with the system. I’ve said this multiple times,” he stated, underlining his concern about the diminishing independence of key democratic institutions.
As part of his US tour, Rahul Gandhi is also expected to speak at Brown University.
Congress performed poorly in the Maharashtra Assembly elections held last year and won a mere 16 seats with only 12.42% of the total votes. Its allies did not do any better, with Shiv Sena (UBT) winning 20 seats with approximately 10% of the vote, and NCP (SP) winning merely 10 seats with 11.28% vote share.
While the MahaYuti alliance of the BJP, NCP, and Shiv Sena won a clear majority with 230 seats combined and forming a government with an effective majority.
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