New Delhi: Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Thursday demanded the immediate resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, alleging that India’s electoral system has been “fundamentally broken” and that the 2024 Lok Sabha and several Assembly elections were rigged “with 100 per cent certainty.”
Addressing the media at Indira Bhawan, AICC headquarters, Gandhi said the disappearance of anti-incumbency in BJP-ruled states was not a political puzzle but evidence that the vote itself had been compromised. Playing video clips of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah speaking of the BJP remaining in power for years, he argued that no leader operating in a democracy can make such claims because anti-incumbency is a “fundamental force” that spare no government.
“Indira Gandhi wins the Bangladesh war, is at the height of her popularity and then suddenly within a year or two, massive anti-incumbency,” he said. The same pattern, he added, had historically applied to Congress and regional parties in Haryana, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat — until, in his telling, it “disappeared” under the BJP.
Gandhi framed the vote as the foundation of the Republic. From the vote, he said, the Constitution draws its power; from the Constitution come laws; from laws come institutions. “If the vote has been destroyed, then our Constitution has been destroyed… If our laws are illegal our institutions are meaningless.” He summed up the chain as “Vote Chori comes Kanoon Chori… from Kanoon Chori comes Sanstha Chori.”
The Congress leader said he was “not speaking in the air” and claimed there was already enough material to leave “absolutely no doubt.” He named CEC Gyanesh Kumar — appointed, he said, by the Prime Minister after a selection process from which Gandhi had recorded a dissent note — as the official responsible for the damage. Two Election Commissioners, he said, had now “come clean” and were holding Kumar accountable for chaos in the voting system.
The press conference followed an Indian Express investigation reporting that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected, on record, at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and processes inside the poll panel, including aspects of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Gandhi treated those internal notes as confirmation that the Commission itself no longer accepted the integrity of the process.
He laid out a sequence. On 21 December 2023, Parliament passed a law granting Election Commissioners immunity from investigation. On 7 February, Congress held a press conference on alleged vote theft in Maharashtra. Gandhi then submitted a dissent note to the Prime Minister on the method of choosing Election Commissioners. Presentations followed on Mahadevpura, the Voter Adhikar Yatra (16 August to 1 September 2025), Aland in Karnataka (18 September 2025) and what he called the “most devastating” Haryana files. Only after sustained public pressure, he said, did the two Commissioners put their objections on record.
Gandhi demanded that Kumar resign at once and “turn approver,” calling that an act of nationalism. He said the Prime Minister and Home Minister sit “at the top of this conspiracy” and “are going to be investigated.” Pointing to a slide grouping political leaders, the CEC and businessmen, he used the word “deshdrohis.” “A person who attacks the vote, who fundamentally destroys India’s democratic institution is nothing other than a Deshdrohi.”
He insisted the charge was not conjecture. “From 2023… for three years, I have been saying this and I have always said it based on fact.” India, he said, now sits at a point it has not occupied since 1947: elections “fundamentally broken,” laws passed by a Parliament elected on a stolen vote open to question, and institutional capture itself in dispute.
The Election Commission has maintained that differing views among Commissioners are part of normal internal deliberation and that official decisions carry full legal sanction. The BJP has described the correspondence as a sign of healthy debate and rejected the vote-theft narrative. Gandhi said the information already in hand would, within months, make the picture “black and white.”