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Informist, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025

 

NEW DELHI – A public interest litigation filed in the Supreme Court on Wednesday sought the constitution of a special investigation team to probe Indian National Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's allegation of large-scale electoral roll manipulation in Bengaluru Central and other affected constituencies in the country. The petitioner Rohit Pandey, an advocate, has sought that no further revision or finalisation of electoral rolls be undertaken until completion of an independent audit of the rolls.

 

The petitioner has requested the top court to frame and issue binding guidelines to the Election Commission of India to ensure transparency, accountability, and integrity in the preparation, maintenance, and publication of electoral rolls, including mechanism for detection and prevention of duplicate or fictitious entries. Further, the petitioner has sought directions to the poll panel to publish electoral rolls in accessible, machine-readable form to enable meaningful verification, audit and public scrutiny.

 

Earlier this month, Rahul Gandhi had given findings of the Congress's six-month study of electoral rolls of Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha seat in 2024, in which he said the party had found around 100,000 allegedly fake voters. Gandhi had said a similar template of allegedly fake addresses, duplicate entries had been used across the country. Responding to this, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had asked the Congress leader to either submit his allegations in a sworn affidavit or apologise to the nation. 

 

In its petition, Pandey gave a detailed table where the names of the same voters have been found registered in multiple constituencies. This, according to Pandey, was in clear violation of the provisions of the Constitution of India. 

 

In Maharashtra, after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and before the Vidhan Sabha elections, within a span of approximately four months, about 3.9 million new voters were added to the electoral roll, whereas in the preceding five years only around 5 million voters had been added, said the petition. Such a sudden and disproportionate increase raises a serious question on the transparency of the Election Commission in the process of adding names to the voter list, said Pandey.

 

"Such manipulation of the voter list strikes at the very root of the constitutional guarantee enshrined under Article 326 (universal adult suffrage), violates Article 324 (superintendence of free and fair elections by the Election Commission of India), and directly infringes Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India, which safeguard equality before law and the right to meaningfully participate in democratic governance," said the petitioner.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Akul Nishant Akhoury

 

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