BENGALURU: With Congress alleging voter fraud in the Bengaluru Central parliamentary constituency, Mansoor Khan, the Congress candidate who contested from the seat in the 2024 polls, has charged that a staggering 52,000 votes were mysteriously added in just ten months in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency between the 2023 Assembly polls and the 2024 parliamentary elections.
Khan was comfortably leading by around 88,000 votes until counting began in Mahadevapura, his supporters said. As the tallies rolled in, his lead not only vanished, it flipped, with the BJP candidate’s numbers surging. “That’s when we knew something was seriously wrong,” Congress workers added. A party-led investigation uncovered shocking anomalies: 30, 40, 50 even 60 voters crammed into a single-room house or a metal-roofed shed, scores of voter IDs with blurred, unidentifiable photos, voters with fathers or husbands named simply ‘WXYZ’, addresses listed as ‘0000’ and 68 registered voters were all shown living inside a brewery.
“Can 68 people realistically live in a brewery? This is not a clerical error. This is a glaring example of bulk voter registration abuse that undermines the very foundation of our democracy,” said Mansoor Khan. Khan is a Congress state general secretary who was part of a team that probed the alleged voter fraud for the past six months. Teams from Congress made dozens of field visits to verify and cross-verify these anomalies.
Despite Congress teams filing RTI applications with the Election Commission, they received “next to nothing substantial” in response, Khan said. “Yet, we refused to give up.” He said, “At least 33,000 were first-time voters. Though they were new voters, some were aged up to 90 years. How can so many, who are first-time voters under Form 6 category, be in 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s?”
KPCC president DK Shivakumar said, “Hundreds of party workers have made scores of visits over six months before this humongous organised scam was exposed.”
This exposé has now become a rallying point for a broader, nationwide outrage over alleged vote manipulation — with the Mahadevapura numbers standing out in the battle over the country’s electoral integrity.
Meanwhile, Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister HK Patil said, “What Rahul Gandhi has said as opposition leader is in public domain and we are in a nation where a postcard has been converted as a petition and it is time for the EC to look into these serious lapses and take action suo motu if necessary and not insist on some procedural issues...remember the law was made for man not man for the law.”