Ballot Blame

Rahul Gandhi’s political compass has long oscillated between self-righteous indignation and strategic incoherence. This past week, he veered yet again into conspiracy-laced territory by alleging that the Maharashtra Assembly poll in November last year was ‘rigged’ to favour the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). His claims, published in an op-ed in a reputed English daily and reiterated across social media, are as reckless as they are repetitive. They expose a stubborn refusal to reckon with electoral reality and an unwillingness to do the hard work of political introspection.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) responded sharply, calling Gandhi’s claims completely absurd and unsubstantiated. It issued a detailed, point-by-point rebuttal backed by hard data which underscored, among other things, how the Congress’ polling agents had raised no concerns on voting day and that additions to the electoral rolls were in line with standard revision cycles. The ECI had dealt with the same accusations in a public reply in December 2024. However, Gandhi, unfazed by facts or institutional process, dismissed the ECI’s reply as ‘evasive’ and has now demanded CCTV footage from polling booths while insinuating that what happened in Maharashtra could repeat in Bihar later this year. His latest assault on India’s electoral process is both intellectually hollow and politically graceless.

This is political petulance of an extreme nature. Rahul Gandhi’s persistent charges of ‘match-fixing’ reveal a familiar pattern. When his party wins, the electoral system is sound. When it loses, the system is suddenly corrupted. The Opposition’s performance in the Assembly polls was dismal, with the MVA managing to secure just 46 of 288 seats, compared to the BJP-led Mahayuti’s commanding tally of over 230. Faced with this sobering verdict, Gandhi has opted to play the arsonist rather than the analyst. Instead of diagnosing organisational failure, regional disunity or candidate mismatch, he blames the scoreboard.

This tactic of cloaking the Congress’s decline in the comforting fog of victimhood does no service to a party sinking daily into the abyss of irrelevance. More worrying is the casual manner in which Gandhi casts aspersions on the Election Commission’s autonomy. If he indeed had any specific booth-level evidence of rigging, he ought to have submitted it to the Commission, not aired them as media innuendos months after the event.

The Congress’s refusal to acknowledge that the election was lost not at the ballot box but on the ground, where the BJP’s voter outreach vastly outpaced its fragmented rivals, speaks volumes about its puerile leadership.

The job of the Leader of the Opposition is not to cry foul with every loss but to rebuild a credible alternative. That requires being serious about policy and reviving the cadre, not continually peddling lazy and tired conspiracy theories. Rahul Gandhi’s political instincts seem permanently trapped in grievance mode. Until he learns that democracy is not a game to be won only on his terms, he will remain less a leader of the Opposition and more a loudspeaker for lost causes.