EDITORIAL: DOES VOTE FRAUD SHOW THAT HINDUTVA IS LIKELY NOT AS POPULAR AS PORTRAYED BY THE MAINSTREAM GODI (LAPDOG) MEDIA?
Vinod Mubayi
It is no secret that the Modi-led BJP regime has systematically subverted all supposedly independent agencies of the Indian state in the last decade to suit its own partisan power and political interests. Thus, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which is supposed to investigate and prosecute financial crimes, mostly targets opposition party politicians. There is a long-standing observation that the BJP acts as a “washing machine” to allow the ED to let opposition party turncoats off the hook if they defect to the BJP. Another agency to suffer this fate is the Election Commission of India (ECI). Before Modi came to power, the ECI had enjoyed a high reputation worldwide for conducting free and fair elections. However, this reputation had begun to erode by the time the BJP under Modi gained its second successive victory in the 2019 national election.
In July 2019, a group of 64 senior civil servants who were members of a Constitutional Conduct Group aided by 83 academic, armed forces veterans, and journalists issued a letter to the ECI that read:
“The 2019 General Elections appear to have been one of the least free and fair elections that the country has had in the past three decades or so. In the past, despite the efforts of criminal elements, musclemen, and unscrupulous politicians, the persons who graced the ECI did their best to ensure that elections were conducted as freely and fairly as possible. In these General Elections, however, an impression has gathered ground that our democratic process is being subverted and undermined by the very constitutional authority empowered to safeguard its sanctity. It was rare in the past for any serious doubts to be raised about the impartiality, integrity, and competence of the [ECI]. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the present ECI and the way it has conducted the General Elections of 2019. So blatant have been the acts of omission and commission by the ECI that even former Elections Commissioners and CECs have been compelled, albeit reluctantly, to question the decisions of their successors in office…Our Election Commission used to be the envy of the entire world, including developed countries, for its ability to conduct free and fair elections despite the huge logistical challenges and the hundreds of millions of voters. It is, indeed, saddening to witness the process of the demise of that.” [‘Dysfunctional’ Election Commission of India & Weaponization of India’s Election System, votefordemocracy.org.in, 2025]
That was in 2019, but much more serious charges against the ECI have emerged six years later, in the conduct of the national elections in April and May 2024, and in later elections the same year in the states of Haryana and Maharashtra. According to a report in The Wire of September 23, 2025 by Vrinda Gopinath, the results of a painstaking investigation in Mahadevapura, an assembly constituency in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat, “showed over 1 lakh (100,000) fake voters and five types of fake voter entries – duplicate voters (11,965 cases), fake addresses (40,009) cases, multiple voters registered to a single address (10,452 cases), invalid photos on ID cards (4,132 cases) and misuse of Form 6 for new voters to registered without the EC’s verification (22,692 cases).” The Congress Party claimed that while the BJP trailed in the other 7 assembly segments of Bangalore Central, the over 100,000 fake voters in Mahadevapura won them the Lok Sabha parliamentary seat. Needless to say, the Election Commission was of no help at all in revealing this fraud, which it has yet to admit. Although the EC uses digital data bases for voter lists and electoral rolls, it refuses to permit public access to these. It provides data only in hard copy not in electronic format. Accordingly, unraveling the vote fraud in Bangalore took a team of researchers six months instead of the 30 seconds it would have taken if the EC had provided the digital data.
In a news conference on September 18, 2025, the Leader of the Opposition in the lower house of parliament, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, made more serious charges of vote theft and accused the Chief Election Commissioner of protecting the culprits by withholding information that could be used to unearth those responsible. Mr. Gandhi referred to the Aland assembly constituency in the Kalburgi district of Karnataka where an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt was made to delete 6,018 names from the electoral roll. This fraud was fortuitously detected since one of the names to be deleted happened to be a close relative of the local electoral registration officer. After the fraudulent attempt was investigated by the Karnataka police, the deletions were blocked, and the names were restored. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Karnataka police wrote to the ECI requesting the IP addresses of the devices from which the attempts were made to delete names, their destination ports and the data of the OTP (one-time password), including the concerned mobile numbers, to unearth those responsible for the crime. Moreover, despite 18 reminders over a period of 18 months, the ECI has refused to part with the data, which understandably led Mr. Gandhi to charge the CEC with protecting the culprits.
The Chief Election Commissioner has so far given evasive responses to the charges made by Mr. Gandhi. In an editorial on September 20, The Hindu newspaper commented that “the ECI reaction [to Rahul Gandhi’s comments] is puzzling – it acknowledges that fraudulent attempts to delete voter names were made and that it had shared details with the police investigating the case but it does not address the core allegations about not responding to the CID’s repeated requests for “destination IP and destination port” data, which are necessary to pinpoint device data and, in turn, the identity and location of the fraudsters. Without this, it would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack.”
Mr. Gandhi pointed out that such deletions and additions were taking place in an organized and centralized way via software that created fake logins in the EC’s portal to fill up a form that is mandated by the EC to add or delete legitimate electors. He remarked that the scale of the operation is such that it is very likely planned and executed by a syndicate or call center employing a dedicated team of professionals using sophisticated software. In an article in The Wire of September 18, 2025, journalist Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashastha remarked that “The contamination of electoral rolls is not new in India, but if its scale is truly as humongous as the Congress leader pointed out…it will crush people’s belief in the Indian electoral system.”
Recently, the ECI carried out a controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise of the electoral roll in the State of Bihar a few months before state elections expected to take place in November this year. As many as 6.5 million voters appear to have been deleted from the rolls in the first phase of this SIR exercise, which has been characterized by a former ECI commissioner, Ashok Lavasa, as a “…procedure that has no precedence and little logic” in an op-ed in the Indian Express newspaper on August 22, 2025.
Given all these revelations about vote manipulation, the question, however, that must be asked is not just what or how criminal fraud is happening in the electoral system and what its extent is, but why it is happening. After all, Modi is reported by the mainstream godi (lapdog) Indian media to enjoy a popularity far beyond anything experienced by his predecessors if the personality cult created by this media is anything to go by. He is spoken of in reverential tones as a Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) and frequently portrayed as a Vishwaguru (World Guru). Newspapers, public hoardings on the streets, and billboards are filled with his portraits and tributes to his 56-inch chest and wisdom. Even international media portray him as an unparalleled Indian leader enjoying immense popularity, although a few cracks in that edifice have now begun to appear, as witnessed in a very recent article in the New York Times newspaper. Hindus are reported to account for 80% of India’s population and Modi’s election speeches frequently bash minorities to polarize majority votes in his favor.
Granted that electoral victory is the means of conferring legitimacy to the rulers, but if he and, by implication, his party are so popular, why does he and his party bosses have to condone, if not actually promote, electoral fraud by his minions? Could there be a flaw in the media image of his popularity that needs to be corrected, for example, by deleting real voters or adding fake ones with the help of a compliant ECI to enable his electoral victories?
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