Phantom Votes

Congress scion Rahul Gandhi’s reckless allegations of ‘vote chori’ is a hackneyed spectacle by now. Detractors say his latest spectacle with respect to the Haryana Assembly election smacks of political desperation. Yet, the Election Commission’s tepid response risks eroding faith and makes one cast needless aspersions on India’s democratic machinery.

Gandhi has trained his rhetorical guns on the Haryana Assembly elections, alleging that as many as 25 lakh ‘fake votes’ were cast. His ‘vote theft’ claims purportedly robbed the Congress of a landslide victory. The alleged smoking gun? A Brazilian model’s photograph, supposedly found on multiple Indian voter ID cards.

It is the sort of story tailor-made for social media: exotic, scandalous and algorithm-friendly. But when journalists did the tedious work of actually verifying Gandhi’s claims, the reality was embarrassingly prosaic. The women whose names were dragged into the so-called scam turned out to be real voters - ordinary Haryanvi citizens - whose ID cards had long suffered from data-entry and printing errors, as often happens in India’s sprawling bureaucracy. Far from being part of a vast electoral conspiracy, these women had, by their own accounts, voted in person using Aadhaar verification.

Gandhi’s performance is not new. When faced with electoral setbacks, he routinely invokes vague conspiracies to deflect from his party’s structural weaknesses. In his telling, democracy itself is rigged, the media compromised and the system is stacked against the Opposition. But this spectacle is also dangerous. To allege without proof that 12 percent of a State’s votes were fraudulent is irresponsible and corrosive. It invites cynicism, undermines public trust and normalises the idea that elections in the world’s largest democracy cannot be believed.

Yet if Rahul Gandhi’s bluster is deplorable, the Election Commission’s ‘silence’ is no less concerning. Its curt dismissal of the allegations hardly counts as reassurance. For an institution charged with safeguarding India’s democratic credibility, such bureaucratic detachment is woefully inadequate. The Commission should have responded forcefully with a barrage of facts, explaining how electoral rolls are verified, how photo mismatches occur and what safeguards prevent double voting.

In failing to mount a strong rebuttal, the EC is allowing a baseless narrative to fester unchecked. A democracy’s watchdog must bark when bitten. Instead, India’s electoral umpire has behaved like a mute spectator, leaving the field open to political theatrics.

The true theft here is not of votes, but of trust. Every time a leader cries fraud without proof and every time an institution responds with timidity, the integrity of India’s democratic compact weakens. Gandhi’s posturing wins him applause in his echo chambers, but it insults the very voters he claims to defend.

India’s democracy, for all its flaws, still rests on the faith of millions who queue patiently to press a button and trust that their vote counts. That faith is not indestructible. However, it is in danger of eroding when leaders weaponize paranoia and regulators retreat into silence.