The BRICS TimesCongress leader and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi launched a sharp attack on the BJP on Wednesday claiming that out of the party’s 240 Lok Sabha MPs, roughly one in every six won their seat through electoral fraud. He questioned whether such MPs should be called “ghuspethiya” the very word BJP uses against others.
Rahul Fires Fresh Salvo Calls Out BJP’s “Vote Chori” MPs
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi went after the BJP on Wednesday in a way the ruling party did not see coming. In a hard-hitting post on X written in Hindi, Gandhi alleged that a staggering number of BJP MPs in the Lok Sabha roughly one out of every six did not win their seats fairly. They won through vote chori, he said a term that translates directly to vote theft.
Gandhi, who serves as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, did not mince words. “Through vote theft, sometimes individual seats are stolen, and at other times, an entire government. Of the 240 BJP MPs in the Lok Sabha, roughly every sixth MP secured seat through vote chori,” he said landing a blow that was as much political as it was personal.
Turning BJP’s Own Language Against Them
The sharpest moment in Gandhi’s statement came when he flipped the script on BJP’s favourite political label. The term “ghuspethiya” meaning infiltrator has long been a BJP favourite used repeatedly against minorities and immigrants in its political campaigns.
Gandhi turned it back on them. “They are not hard to identify should we, in the BJP’s own parlance, label them ‘ghuspethiya’?” he asked making his point with a rhetorical precision that was hard to miss.
Haryana Singled Out “Entire Government Is a Ghuspethiya”
Gandhi did not stop at Parliament. He extended his attack to Haryana a state whose recent electoral outcome he described as deeply compromised. “What of Haryana? There, the entire government itself is a ‘ghuspethiya’. The very institutions they keep in their pockets the ones they manipulate to distort voter lists and the electoral process are themselves ‘remote-controlled’,” he said.
The charge pointed directly at what Gandhi sees as a systemic rot where not just individual MPs, but entire state governments, owe their existence to rigged processes rather than genuine public mandates.
“They Would Not Win Even 140 Seats in a Fair Election”
Gandhi then pushed his argument to its logical conclusion. He claimed that if free and fair elections were held today without manipulation, without distorted voter rolls, without institutional backing the BJP would not be able to cross even 140 seats in the Lok Sabha. That is a significant fall from the 240 they currently hold.
“Their real fear is the truth. For if fair elections were to be held, they would not be able to win even 140 seats today,” he said framing the BJP’s alleged reliance on vote theft not just as a moral failure, but as proof of electoral weakness.
Bengal and Assam The Bigger Picture
Gandhi’s remarks on Wednesday were part of a broader offensive he has been mounting all week. A day earlier on Tuesday he had described the BJP’s victories in the West Bengal and Assam assembly polls as a “theft” of public mandate. He backed Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s claims and said more than 100 seats in Bengal had been stolen.
“Assam and Bengal are clear cases of the election being stolen by the BJP with the support of the Election Commission. We agree with Mamata ji. More than 100 seats were stolen in Bengal,” Gandhi had said in a post on X adding that this was not a new playbook. He listed Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, and the 2024 Lok Sabha elections as earlier chapters in the same story.
“This Is Bigger Than One Party”
Gandhi also took a moment to call out members of his own party and others who appeared to be quietly celebrating TMC’s humiliation at the hands of the BJP in Bengal. His message was clear: this is not the time for petty politics.
“Some in the Congress, and others, are gloating about TMC’s loss. They need to understand this clearly the theft of Assam and Bengal’s mandate is a big step forward by the BJP in its mission to destroy Indian democracy,” he said. “Put petty politics aside. This is not about one party or another.”
The Anti-National Act, Gandhi’s Lok Sabha Address Revisited
This is not the first time Gandhi has raised the banner of vote chori and gone well beyond campaign sloganeering. In a fiery address inside the Lok Sabha, he called vote theft “the biggest anti-national act” because it destroys, in his words, “the fabric of this country, modern India, the idea of India.”
During that speech, he raised specific irregularities a Brazilian woman’s name allegedly appearing 22 times on a Haryana voter list, one voter’s name showing up more than 200 times, and 1.2 lakh duplicate images found in Bihar’s voter rolls even after a Special Intensive Revision. He also questioned why the Chief Justice of India was removed from the Election Commission selection panel and why election commissioners were given sweeping legal immunity.
BJP Hits Back, Congress Started It
The BJP did not take the attacks lying down. MP Nishikant Dubey pushed back in Parliament arguing that it was the Congress, not the BJP, that pioneered the use of Electronic Voting Machines. He pointed out that EVMs were first tested under Rajiv Gandhi in 1987 and expanded under Narasimha Rao in 1991. He dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as baseless framing them as a pre-emptive attempt to undermine the credibility of the Election Commission ahead of future elections.
The confrontation inside Parliament and outside it reflects how deeply polarised India’s political landscape has become around the question of electoral integrity. For Gandhi and the Opposition, free and fair elections are now the defining battle of Indian democracy. For the BJP, the charges are nothing more than the Congress manufacturing a political narrative it has no other way to win.
