Congress asks ECI to nullify 2024 Lok Sabha election citing BJP MP Anurag Thakur’s allegation of fraudulent voting

Pawan Khera addressing a press conference at AICC HQ in New Delhi on Thursday, August 14, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar

 

The 2024 General Election should be nullified since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Anurag Thakur had also claimed there was fraudulent voting in six Lok Sabha constituencies, the Congress demanded on Thursday (August 14, 2025) mounting a fresh offensive against the Election Commission of India (ECI) over alleged electoral malpractices. 

On Wednesday (August 13, 2025), Mr. Thakur had listed constituencies, including Rae Bareli, Kannauj, Wayanad, and Diamond Harbour, where fake voters were allegedly present in large numbers. 

Addressing a press conference at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) office, party spokesperson and chairperson of the Congress’s media and publicity department Pawan Khera claimed Mr. Thakur’s press conference “validated, with evidence, what Rahul Gandhi had said a week ago”.

“Yesterday’s press conference [by Mr. Thakur] proved that the last General Election was held on fake votes. Shouldn’t that election be cancelled?” Mr. Khera said. 

He demanded the ECI and Mr. Thakur also make public the electronic voter list data of Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency. “We know the Prime Minister does not deserve to be where he is as, based on fake votes, he barely managed to win the Varanasi seat in 2024. He was trailing for half a day but then got a booster dose of fake votes,” Mr. Khera alleged.

Alleging collusion between the BJP and the ECI, he said that while the Congress had taken six months to collate the data of just one Assembly segment out of seven under one Lok Sabha seat, the BJP leader had “managed to get machine-readable electronic data of entire six parliamentary constituencies within six days”.

Why had no letter or notice been sent by the ECI to Mr. Thakur, Mr. Khera asked, since the poll panel had done so with Mr. Gandhi while the latter was still holding his press conference. 

“The slogan, vote chor, gaddi chhor (vote thief, vacate the seat) is reverberating in the entire country, and has become a mass movement now,” Mr. Khera said.