New Delhi, Nov 5 (IANS) Congress leader Rahul Gandhi doubled down on his voter fraud charge on Wednesday and alleged that the vote chori was not limited to isolated constituencies like Aland and Mahadevapura -- as flagged earlier -- but was happening on a national level, with the sole intention of 'benefitting' the ruling BJP.  He claimed that there was a centralised and systemic approach to destroy the country’s democratic fabric, and both the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Centre were acting in collusion to steal not just constituencies but the entire state.

Dropping the ‘H’ files bomb in the detailed press meet, Rahul Gandhi claimed that the entire Haryana election was stolen because of the poll panel’s "incompetence or rather complicity", over duplicate and fake voters. Citing the example of Brazilian voters casting' votes in 10 constituencies of Haryana, he claimed vote chori of about 25 lakh votes in the state, where the total number of electorates stands at two crore. He claimed that there were 1.2 lakh entries in Haryana’s electoral rolls where many voters shared the same photograph, but the ECI was not using its software to remove them despite being duly empowered to do so.

“Why is the ECI not removing the duplicates? If they remove the duplicates, this will allow fair elections, which the ECI doesn’t want,” he told the press. He also claimed that there were over 5.21 lakh duplicate entries, and many voters, including BJP functionaries, are registered in two states -- Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The Congress leader further questioned the ECI’s ‘dubious’ handling of duplicate voters in the electoral rolls and countered the CEC’s explanation of identifying homeless voters as those with '0' house number.

Countering CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s explanation of identifying the address of the homeless as 0, he accused the poll panel of deliberately not verifying their addresses and quoted ECI’s rules, which mandate that ground verification is mandatory if any address has more than 10 registered voters. He further claimed that 3.5 lakh voters -- nearly 2 per cent of the electorate -- were deleted in the state, between the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections. He claimed that most of these electors were traditional Congress voters. He also played out recorded clips of some voters from the state, who backed Rahul Gandhi’s claims.

Further escalating the attack, the Congress MP claimed that the ECI is working in collusion with the BJP government at the Centre and together they have collaborated to destroy the Constitutional framework of the country. “A systematic method to destroy democracy has been put in place, and we believe that the next casualty of this could be Bihar,” he claimed and cited Special Intensive Revision (SIR) as one of the “latest weapons” to steal elections in poll-bound states. Addressing questions on Congress' failure to raise these grievances before elections, Rahul Gandhi said that since electoral rolls are provided at the last minute, it allows parties a very small window to detect anomalies and take them up with the ECI.