At a sprawling bungalow in the heart of the Indian capital several “dead” Indian voters gather around a table to drink tea with India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi.
“I heard you are not alive anymore,” Gandhi asks Ramikbal Ray, a resident from the eastern state of Bihar. Ramikbal confirms with a wry smile that he has “been declared dead despite being alive.”
The 66-year-old man says his name was not included in the draft electoral rolls published by the Election Commission of India (ECI), the federal poll body in charge of conducting elections in the world’s largest democracy.
Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that controls the main opposition Congress party, has accused the ECI of helping prime minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win elections across the country by manipulating the voters’ rolls. The BJP, which performed below expectations in the national elections in 2024 and had to rely on allies to form a government, went on to win several state polls with relative ease.
The BJP and the ECI have both denied the rigging charges.
Ramikbal is among the 65,000,00 Indian voters whose names have been excluded from the draft electoral rolls by ECI. These voters were either assumed to be absentees, dead, or have shifted ahead of a crucial vote in Bihar, India’s third most populous state.
At least seven of them were invited by Gandhi to his bungalow in Delhi where a table was laid out to serve tea to these “dead” Indian voters. According to the opposition, most of the eliminated voters were from Raghopur village – a voting constituency of one of Modi’s key rivals Tejashwi Yadav from the regional Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).
“There have been many interesting experiences in life, but I never got the chance to have tea with ‘dead people’. For this unique experience, thank you Election Commission,” Gandhi quips.
He asks the “dead” voters if they have toured Delhi, because as ghosts, they will not be required to purchase tickets at the city’s tourist spots.
Hours later, Gandhi tells The Independent that he and his party were seeing “serious discrepancies and disconnects” in the latest election results. Gandhi, who has launched a “vote adhikar yatra” (voting rights march) across Bihar to highlight his claims of voters’ list manipulation, is joined by Subodh Kumar, another “deceased Indian voter”.
“I have been declared dead by India’s polly body, even when I cast my vote last year in the general assembly elections and served as a polling agent as well,” Kumar says, as hundreds in the crowd who had turned up for Gandhi’s march, listen. Polling agents are representative of a political candidate fighting elections.
“The game we are playing is rigged. Modi and his party are the only ones in the world who do not face anti-incumbency, apparently,” Gandhi says at a briefing with reporters at his official residence in central Delhi.
According to his allegations, Modi’s party stole the mandate in at least three state elections in the recent past – Maharashtra, Haryana, and Madhya Pradesh. Gandhi warns rigging will happen in the upcoming polls in Bihar, dates for which have not been announced but the exercise will likely take place by the end of this year.
The poll body removed 6.5 million names of Indian voters after a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) it said was aimed at eliminating dead, duplicate, or migrated voters. Gandhi claims the 6.5 million missing voters from the list could be used by the BJP to claim victory in Bihar.
ECI says the SIR, a door-to-door verification drive conducted between 25 June and 26 July, had reached all 78.9 million registered voters in the eastern state. The exercise was the first extensive update since 2003 and was long overdue but its timing – mere months before state elections – has been termed suspicious by former election body officials and opposition leaders in the country.
The Bihar revision is now at the centre of a wider political storm in India, amplified by Gandhi accusing the election commission of enabling large-scale voter suppression to boost Modi’s winning chances.
Chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar defended the poll body, asking if it can come under influence (of politicians) and allow the dead, those who have migrated, or have registered themselves as electors at multiple places, be included in the voters’ list, according to The Hindu newspaper.
“Isn’t a pure voter list being prepared by the Election Commission through a transparent process, the foundation for fair elections and a strong democracy?” he says.
An internal investigation by Gandhi’s party into the Bengaluru Central constituency in recently held state assembly elections in the southern state of Karnataka from 2023 allegedly showed at least 1,00,250 votes being “stolen”.
Of these, at least 11,965 were allegedly duplicate voters – which means a person carrying a single vote was registered in four different constituencies. The Congress allegedly found at least 40,009 voters who were registered with the Indian election body with fake and invalid addresses. For example, electoral lists shared by the Congress with The Independent showed Indian voters registered at non-existent addresses, labeled “House number – 0”. In other cases, made-up names were used for family members of voters.
In the third category, at least 10,452 bulk voters in one house were registered. “A house as big as this carpet has 80 people registered living there,” Gandhi says, pointing to a 8 inch by 8 inch carpet, referring to smaller village homes. “Oftentimes, our team found these houses occupied by BJP leaders,” he says.
In other categories, at least 4,132 voters were allegedly registered with invalid photos or no photos at all and at least 33,692 voters through the misuse of Form 6 – which is meant for first time voters. Congress claims the Indian poll body registered people aged 90 as first time voters but proof of their existence has not been found.
Congress says it found a 70-year-old woman named Shakun Rani who has filled Form 6 as a first-time Indian voter twice in two months, and voted twice as well.
These 100,000 votes reemerged where BJP has won in Bengaluru Central’s Mahadevpura.
“The BJP trailed Congress in the other seven assembly segments of Bangalore Central. 100,570 fake voters in Mahadevapura won them this Lok Sabha seat,” according to a dossier by the Congress shared with The Independent.
The Independent has reached out to the ECI for a response to these claims by Congress leaders.
Former federal minister and BJP MP Ravi Shankar Prasad accused Gandhi of spreading “canards” and making baseless “vote theft” allegations at a press conference at the BJP state headquarters.
Prasad said in the 2024 Lok Sabha (lower house of Indian parliament) election, the regional Samajwadi Party won 37 seats in Uttar Pradesh, while BJP won 33, and Congress six.
“Even in that election, the Election Commission was the same. If people vote for them, then the Commission is fine, but if they lose, then the Commission is bad – how can this logic work?” he asks.
“If the people do not vote for Rahul Gandhi, what can anyone do? In Haryana, Delhi, and Maharashtra assembly elections, BJP won because the people saw through his lies,” Prasad says.
In Bihar’s Sasaram, where Gandhi is replicating his Unite India March with a campaign trail, he asked a crowd, “You agree that they are stealing your votes… Does Bihar agree? The crowd of his party supporters is heard roaring back, “yes”.
“Prime minister Narendra Modi, union home minister Amit Shah and the Election Commissioners were all complicit in the conspiracy of snatching the votes of the people of Bihar,” Gandhi adds.
The Congress leader says he is counting on the public to challenge the Election Commission and rally against vote theft, be aware of their voting rights, and notice discrepancies if their names or addresses are manipulated.
“We are pretty confident that rigging is affecting elections after elections in India. We are not keen to destroy the Election Commission’s credibility,” he says.
“There is a strong undercurrent in India against this and we are hoping voters in Bihar will challenge this rigging,” he says.
