New Delhi, Aug 2 (IANS) Addressing the annual Legal Conclave titled ‘Constitutional Challenges – Perspectives & Pathways’, Congress MP and Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Saturday, launched a fierce attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI) accusing it of enabling electoral fraud. He said the grand old party has “conclusive evidence” of this fraud by the poll panel and he claimed that the institution has “disappeared” and no longer functions independently.

In his speech before over 1,500 delegates, including senior Congress leaders and legal professionals, LoP Gandhi stated that the Congress party has obtained “conclusive evidence” of voter list manipulation and large-scale electoral malpractice.

“My allies would say to me, ‘yes, we can see that cheating has happened. But we don’t have proof.’ And now, I say with absolutely no doubt that we have proof,” he declared.

“We have such proof that will show the whole country that the institution of the Election Commission, as we know it, does not exist anymore. That it has disappeared.”

LoP Gandhi said the party conducted a six-month-long investigation into physical, booth-wise voter lists provided by the Election Commission. The documents, he alleged, were deliberately made unscannable and uncopyable.

“Why would the Election Commission protect the voter list like that? The paper versions they give cannot be scanned or copied. It took us six months of non-stop work to find this proof,” he said.

The Congress leader said that his team compared six-and-a-half lakh voter photographs and names manually, uncovering that one-and-a- half lakh were fake.

“We went photograph by photograph, name by name, comparing six and a half lakh entries. And I’m proud of the work the Congress Party did,” he said.

LoP Gandhi recounted his long-held suspicions about the integrity of elections since 2014, saying he was particularly shocked by the sudden defeat of the Congress and its allies in Maharashtra after a clear Lok Sabha victory.

“Three formidable parties suddenly just evaporated. That’s when I thought, this just cannot be. And so we started seriously looking into electoral malpractice,” he stated.

He added that despite early signs of irregularities in states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, it wasn’t until recent months that his party gathered hard documentation, “This is treason, nothing less than that. And we will find you,” he said, in a pointed warning to those allegedly involved in tampering with the democratic process.

He called on the legal community stating that the constitutional framework they built was being dismantled.

“It was the legal minds, the legal fraternity that built this entire architecture. And it is being systematically unravelled on every front, some visible, others hidden,” he said.

The allegations come amid heightened scrutiny over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process in Bihar and alleged voter list irregularities in polls across Karnataka and Maharashtra.

–IANS

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