Bengaluru, India – Three months after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi publicly alleged irregularities in voter lists in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency, a local Congress worker has filed a formal police complaint. The complaint alleges the illegal addition of names to voter rolls ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Y Vinoda, a 39-year-old Congress worker, lodged the complaint with the Whitefield police on November 19th. She stated that she was “deeply pained” by allegations of fraudulent voter additions in Mahadevapura, implicating “unknown officials and private persons.”
Police have registered a First Information Report (FIR) based on the complaint, citing charges of breach of trust and forgery. The FIR also invokes Section 129 of the Representation of the People Act, which prohibits election officials from actions that could favor a specific candidate.
However, the legal standing of the FIR is uncertain. Legal experts suggest that only officials from the Election Commission (EC) are authorized to file complaints related to voter list irregularities.
In her complaint, Vinoda alleges, “According to information available in the public domain, huge numbers of fake voter names were added to the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency voter lists – which is part of the Bangalore Central parliamentary seat – ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. This was done to manipulate the poll verdict of the people in the region.” Vinoda, who serves as the president of the Congress women’s unit for the Bangalore Central constituency, is calling for a “thorough and unbiased investigation.”
“The addition of large numbers of fake voters could not have happened without a nexus between officials, a political party and private persons,” she asserted.
Adding a layer of political context, Vinoda was appointed as the Congress block president for the Marathahalli region within the Mahadevapura constituency just a day after the FIR was filed. She received her official ID from H Nagesh and Mansoor Ali Khan, who were unsuccessful Congress candidates in the 2023 Assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha elections, respectively.
The current investigation is not the first instance of concerns surrounding voter list integrity in Mahadevapura. In 2022, a local Booth Level Officer filed a police complaint regarding alleged manipulation attempts by a private agency, Chilume Trust, contracted by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to gather voter data in Mahadevapura and two other constituencies. That case remains pending in the courts.
Similar concerns arose in 2023 in the Aland constituency in the Kalaburagi region of Karnataka. Congress candidate B R Patil highlighted an illegal vote deletion racket, which was also spotlighted by Rahul Gandhi. In that instance, local police registered an FIR based on a complaint from an election officer after the EC confirmed the allegations.
A key point of contention is the shifting political landscape. The BJP was in power in Karnataka during the 2022 and 2023 allegations concerning Mahadevapura and Aland. However, the Congress party held power in the state in 2024 when the alleged voter list tampering is said to have occurred.
Rahul Gandhi specifically alleged that the BJP illegally added 100,000 votes in Mahadevapura ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to secure the Bangalore Central seat. He further claimed that 11,965 of these were fake voters, 40,009 had fake addresses, and 10,452 were registered at multiple addresses.
BJP leader Aravind Limbavalli, a long-time political figure in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency, has dismissed the allegations as “invalid, baseless,” and “immature.” He attributed the significant increase in voter numbers – from 275,000 in 2008 to 680,000 currently – to the substantial influx and outflow of migrant workers in the area since the constituency’s creation in 2008.
An investigation by The Indian Express into the addresses cited by Gandhi revealed that while the addresses corresponded to areas with a high concentration of migrant workers, none of the 194 individuals listed by Gandhi as residing at those addresses were currently living there, according to caretakers and managers.
While the Congress party points to the BJP’s victory margin of 114,000 votes in Mahadevapura in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls as evidence of manipulation, the BJP has consistently won both the Mahadevapura Assembly and Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seats in all four elections since the Mahadevapura constituency was established in 2008. The current police investigation is ongoing.
