New Delhi: A special court in Karnataka on Wednesday, November 5, granted anticipatory bail to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subhash Guttedar, accused by a Special Investigative Team (SIT) of Karnataka Police of allegedly manipulating the voter list in the Aland assembly constituency.

On the same day, leader of opposition in Lok Sabha, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, alleged in a press conference held in Delhi that a Brazilian model had voted 22 times in the 2024 Haryana assembly election. He said the woman was just one instance of the 25 lakh votes his party alleges were "stolen" in the northern state during the last election.

Meanwhile, the special court in Karnataka, meant to examine only cases against public representatives, said Guttedar (74), his son and an associate would have to present themselves to investigators within 10 days. The court reportedly noted that since the SIT claims to have collected all the required digital evidence in the Aland case, therefore, the question of the accused tampering with evidence did not arise.

The Indian Express also reported the court's observations in Guttedar's anticipatory bail order: "On taking a cursory look into the materials which are placed before the court, nowhere it is indicated that the petitioners were directly involved in the above case." It also observed: "...the petitioners cannot be made to undergo incarceration till the completion of the investigation."

Guttedar and the others had sought anticipatory bail though an application on October 30, the Indian Express had reported.

Recent developments in Aland probe

Late last month, SIT sleuths probing the Aland case had raided the residences of the BJP leader and three others in Kalaburagi district, suspecting they were behind a larger operation of manipulating voter lists. The SIT claimed that it had found forged Form-7 applications that had been filed to delete genuine voters from the rolls in Aland.

Form 7 is a standardised format used by the Election Commission for voters to seek deletion and addition of names in the voter roll of a constituency by a voter or another person. The form is crucial for the process of "claims and objections" that the commission relies upon to clean up electoral rolls and ensure only genuine voters are included, while none are wrongly excluded.

According to the Karnataka SIT, a data centre-like operation was also allegedly being run by four persons in Kalaburagi, and Rs 80 per genuine voter deleted was paid to delete each genuine voter.

The case came to light after the 2023 polls in Karnataka, when BR Patil, the winning Congress candidate from the Aland seat, complained about forged Form 7s submitted to delete his supporters from the rolls in the constituency. An inquiry by the Returning Officer (RO) reportedly found that of the 6,018 Form 7s claimed to be wrongfully deleted, 5,994 were indeed forged.

The SIT has also alleged that Guttedar and others attempted to destroy physical evidence related to the electoral rolls and voter lists.

Guttedar and the other accused have denied any involvement in manipulating the electoral rolls of Aland and said that all the charges and accusations against them are untrue.

The SIT in Karnataka was formed after Rahul Gandhi had addressed a press conference in the state, following a report published in The Hindu detailing the problems being probed by the police. The SIT is headed by the Karnataka Additional Director-General of Police (ADGP), Criminal Investigation Department (CID), B.K. Singh.

What are Haryana allegations about?

Rahul Gandhi has led his party's charge against the Election Commission of India from the front for over a year. He claims that the alleged vote theft is part of an organised effort by the Union government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to "kill" the Constitution and "destroy" India's democracy.

On Wednesday, November 5, Gandhi alleged that one person had 223 votes in two booths – with the same photograph on all his (or her) EPIC (voter) cards.

Before the Haryana election, he told the press, 35 lakh voters were "deleted" from the state's voter lists, while 1.24 lakh voters had used "fake" photographs.

EC 'in partnership with PM and home minister,' alleges Congress

In the case of Karnataka's Aland assembly constituency, the Congress party has been demanding a thorough probe and strict action against any wrongdoers. It has alleged that the Election Commission refuses to supply data to the public that would have cleared doubts about inclusion and exclusion from the voter list.

The Election Commission, while it has strongly denied any allegations of illegality or manipulation, is regularly charged by Congress leaders of not supplying the requisite information, which it says ought to be in the public domain in any case.

Last month, there were reports from Bengaluru that the CID probe into the Aland case had stalled due to the Election Commission of India (ECI) not sharing key technical data it needed to identify the culprits. The SIT had sent 18 letters seeking the data, The Hindu reported on September 19, 2025.

Regarding the Haryana allegations, the Congress party claims that 5.21 lakh voters in the 2024 election were "duplicates" – meaning that they were registered as voters in more than one constituency, which is illegal. It also says that 93174 voters were "invalid" – meaning that their vote ought not to have been counted.

Further, the Congress has alleged – and the BJP has strongly denied – that BJP members "mass voted" in the Haryana election as well as in Uttar Pradesh. Both states are BJP-ruled at present and since 2017 (Uttar Pradesh) and 2014 (Haryana).

"The EC is in partnership with the PM and the Home Minister. They have destroyed [the] poll process. This is [the] reality of Indian democracy," he said, the Deccan Herald reported on Wednesday.

Gandhi also claimed that the Election Commission "deletes CCTV" records due to these alleged wrongdoings at the booth level. He was referring to a change in the rules of the constitutional body to allow the deletion of CCTV records 45 days after polls.

Previously, the Congress party had charged the commission with deleting CCTV footage of voters queing up in outside the polling booths in Maharashtra after 5 PM – when only those who have already arrived can vote. Gandhi had claimed that such heavy polling was improbable after 5 PM, but the CCTV records of it were deleted, and could not be verified.

The latest allegations come a day before the two-phase Assembly election in Bihar begins, amid massive mobilisation by Opposition parties, including the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Congress party, against the special intensive revision of the voter lists in the state, just a month before the polls.

The exercise was officially aimed to weed out illegal voters, and created a buzz around 'ghuspetiya' or foreign infiltrators in the border districts of Nepal. However, an investigation by The Wire has shown the illegal nationals discovered through the process was next to negligible.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.