New Delhi, August 8(HS):

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has once again dismissed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's recent allegations regarding electoral roll irregularities, terming them baseless and aimed solely at creating public sensation. The Commission emphasized that these are recycled accusations from 2018 which had already been addressed and legally rejected.

The ECI stated that there exists a clear legal procedure for raising objections and filing appeals concerning voter lists, but instead of respecting those processes, Gandhi has sought to sensationalize the issue through the media. The Commission argued that if Gandhi truly believes in his claims, he should either sign a sworn affidavit or publicly apologize for misleading the nation.

Referring to the 2018 case filed by then Madhya Pradesh Congress Chief Kamal Nath, the Commission recalled that the accusations at that time were based on facial comparisons from certain websites suggesting multiple voter entries for the same person. However, the ECI clarified that the discrepancies had already been corrected four months prior, and a corrected list had been shared with the Congress party. The Supreme Court had also dismissed a related petition seeking searchable PDF versions of the electoral rolls.

In the current instance, the ECI pointed out that Rahul Gandhi has chosen to raise similar concerns again in 2025, alleging, for example, that a name like “Aditya Srivastava” appears in three states. The Commission noted that such errors were long since corrected and that raising them now is misleading.

The ECI underlined that the Supreme Court had provided a clear decision on the use of machine-readable electoral documents, and it viewed the repeated raising of these settled issues as disrespect to the Court’s rulings.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar