Aland, Rajura and What Rahul Gandhi Indicates About Targets for Electoral Roll Tampering

A significant aspect in Rahul Gandhi’s recent presentation on how there was a systematic attempt to get electors deleted from the rolls went largely unnoticed.

The Congress leader chose north Karnataka’s Aland assembly constituency to establish that there may have been an external entity which may have deployed a software programme to first pick booth-wise complainants and used their identities to send in online applications to the Election Commission for deleting multiple electors. He added that the external entity faked their phone numbers and forged their log-ins to subvert a system that was originally meant to remedy errors in electoral rolls.

Gandhi said that the Congress also noticed a similar pattern of targeting legitimate electors in Rajura, Maharashtra. However, while Aland saw an allegedly organised attempt to get electors deleted, Rajura experienced a similar effort by ‘someone’ to get electors added. He showed how in both assembly constituencies, select polling booths that have been traditionally Congress strongholds according to Gandhi were earmarked to send in applications to either delete or add electors, depending on political circumstances.

What joins Aland and Rajura that made these assembly seats ideal for targeting? Both these seats have been hotly-contested seats between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress. Victory margins in these constituencies have often been decided by a switch of a few hundred or thousand votes in almost all recent elections. Even a marginal change in electoral rolls can easily upend the outcome in one’s favour.

In 2018, BJP’s Subhash Guttedar defeated Congress’ B.R. Patil by merely 697 votes. The elaborate attempt to get 6018 voters deleted from the electoral rolls in 10 booths, as claimed by Gandhi and later admitted even by the EC, happened in December 2022, months ahead of the 2023 assembly elections in Karnataka. The EC said that it received 6018 Form 7 applications (required to delete or add electors), but found 5994 of them forged or incorrect, resulting in their rejections.

That ‘someone’ who according to Gandhi tried to corrupt the rolls clearly worked under the assumption that in a closely-fought election in Aland, even a small number of deletions could benefit the BJP.

The EC lodged a police complaint against the organised attempt to delete electors in February, 2023, only after a booth-level officer accidentally found that her uncle’s name was missing in the rolls. When she enquired about it, she found that her neighbour was said to be the complainant who requested the EC through Form 7 to delete her uncle’s name. As the neighbour flatly refused to have any involvement in the matter, the situation alerted the Congress’ candidate Patil, who later uncovered the fraud and prevented it with the help of local EC officials. Eventually, Patil wrested the seat from BJP’s Guttedar in 2023 by a little over 10,000 votes.

The case of Rajura is different, but still reflects the organised way with which the fraud was sought to be put into effect. Like Aland, Rajura has also been witnessing nail-bitingly close triangular contests between the Congress, BJP and Sharad Joshi’s Swatantra Bharat Paksh (SBP). In 2019, Congress’ Subhash Dhote edged past SBP’s Wamanrao Chatap by a marginal 2,501 votes, while BJP’s Sanjay Dhote trailed in the third place but finished with merely 6,676 fewer votes than Chatap.

Now, the EC has confirmed Gandhi’s claims that there were indeed attempts to add electors in Rajura ahead of 2024 assembly polls. A total of 7,792 applications for new voter registration (Form 6) were received by the EC, out of which it rejected 6861 such applications - again affirming the organised pattern through which an external entity tried to materialise fraudulent new electors. The EC said that it has lodged a police complaint in Rajura, too.

Here, too, even a small number of additions had the possibility of swinging the electoral outcome in favour of BJP, establishing Gandhi’s claim that the external entity attempting to contaminate electoral rolls is surely working to hand the saffron party a certain degree of advantage.

One could rightly point out that a small number of additions or deletions, even if wrongful, may not change the political directions of assembly constituencies which have a few lakh electors. However, seen against the backdrop of Aland and Rajura, where these small alterations can entirely transform the electoral outcomes, the matter of “vote chori” by corrupting electoral rolls assumes alarming proportions.

Recent elections have also shown how small swings in electoral outcomes in select seats can transform the complexion of assembly polls entirely, in the way one saw in the Haryana assembly polls and Bihar assembly elections in 2020. Some other analyses have shown how BJP performed exceedingly well with newly-added electors ahead of the 2024 Maharashtra assembly elections.

The modus operandi of the external entity is clear – strategically fix electoral rolls by bombarding Form 6 and 7 applications illegally and expect a substantial percentage of these to be accepted by using its regional influence. But both Aland and Rajura show that such targeting may be happening mostly in what are considered swing seats. Attempts were made in an organised fashion to delete electors in Aland where BJP would have benefitted by fewer Congress voters, and add electors in Rajura where BJP would have benefited by new voters.

Also read: After ‘Incorrect and Baseless’ Remark, EC Now Provides Curious Thrust to Rahul Gandhi’s Allegations

The EC is correct that in spite of these fraudulent applications, no applicant has the power to directly add or delete electors from the electoral rolls – and that these applications are verified by the EC officials before being accepted or rejected.

However, the ongoing “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) exercise to sanitise electoral rolls in Bihar has clearly shown that often these applications are verified by booth-level officers (BLO) who are prone to both corrupt and lazy behaviour. The high number of objections in the SIR process against wrongful deletions testify to not only this, but also that the EC has no proper mechanism to cross-check BLO’s actions on the ground. The senior officials of the EC often go by the BLO’s report, with an assumption that the latter must have already verified their report.

There existed a possibility that the BLOs could have accepted many of the illegitimate applications in Aland, had the Congress’s Aland candidate Patil not caught them on time. More often than not, the BLOs, whose primary jobs are in lower ranks of the government, are not neutral observers but sympathetic to a political party depending on their caste and class affiliations.

The EC has been on the defensive ever since Gandhi exposed the many ways through which electoral rolls are being sought to be modified in a particular political direction. The fact that someone is trying to deliberately corrupt the electoral rolls and may be doing so through an automated programme is in itself ominous for Indian democracy.

The EC must address these concerns seriously and immediately. However, what it also needs to do – and it is high time it did so – is to evolve a sturdy mechanism to oversee and monitor work of its own ground-level officials. That will fix not only the controversy that has erupted over the SIR in Bihar but also strengthen the process of its annual summary revision of electoral rolls.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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