Pravin Chakravarthy briefed Rahul wrongly on voting spurt post 5 pm’.
NEW DELHI: Unhappiness is growing among Maharashtra Congress leaders against All India Professionals’ Congress chief Praveen Chakravarty for briefing Rahul Gandhi wrongly, which led to the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha targeting the Election Commission of India over an alleged spurt in voter turnout in the state in last year’s Assembly elections, post 5 pm.
Sources indicated that some top Maharashtra Congress leaders have expressed their dissatisfaction with Rahul Gandhi blindly trusting Chakravarty and writing to the poll panel and blaming the EC without verifying the facts with the state leaders. They believe that Chakravarty fed wrong information to Rahul Gandhi, which led him to write a news article picked by several media outlets, the up source said. The source said that it’s embarrassing for the party to claim that there was something unusual in a vote spike post 5 p.m., for this is a usual occurrence in every election.
The source explained that those who have their voter identification card cannot be stopped from voting as it is their fundamental right and the party candidates collect Form 17C which has the signatures of the presiding officer as well as the polling agents of the candidates. The source said that some party leaders feel that main issue was of “fake voter addition” between the Lok Sabha elections and the Assembly elections last year in Maharashtra and the leadership should have raised the issue with the ECI.
However, when asked if they have echoed their thoughts with the party leadership in Delhi, the source said that they were yet to do so. On February 4 this year, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi had alleged that about 70 lakh voters, equivalent to Himachal Pradesh’s population, were added to the electoral rolls in Maharashtra between the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in 2024, and demanded the Commission furnish data to opposition parties in the state. He also claimed that voter turnout had been inflated and bogus voting had been allowed. He even wrote an opinion piece on June 7 and alleged that the Maharashtra Assembly elections had been “rigged” to favour the BJP and warned that the “same tactics could be repeated” in the upcoming Bihar assembly elections.
The Congress leader once again questioned the conduct of the 2024 Maharashtra polls, in what is arguably his most direct attack yet on the electoral process under the Narendra Modi government. The poll panel had denied the allegations by formally writing to Rahul Gandhi saying that all polls are held as per laws passed by Parliament and rules.
The poll panel also emphasised that the entire poll exercise involves thousands of personnel, including boothlevel agents appointed by political parties. But for Chakravarty, this is not a new episode that he will be facing from his own party leaders. He had faced similar charges in 2019 after the Shakti platform, which was launched in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections that year to connect the Gandhis in Delhi with the state leaders and workers across every booth, village, block, and district, had failed.
Congress party leaders and workers had alleged that the Shakti platform had failed in 2019, and may have even contributed to the Congress’s drubbing in the Lok Sabha elections the same year by giving the leadership a false impression of the party’s strengths and weakness.
