Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 18: After receiving a severe drubbing in the hands of the NDA in the Bihar Assembly elections, the congress has decided to further intensify its campaign against the alleged “vote chori” by the Election Commission of India and called upon the poll body to “immediately demonstrate that it is not operating under the BJP shadow.”
The Congress had called for a review meeting on Tuesday of in-charges, State unit chiefs, Congress Legislature Party leaders and secretaries of 12 States and Union territories where “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) of the electoral rolls is underway. The Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and former party chief Rahul Gandhi, and AICC general secretary organisation K.C. Venugopal participated in the review meeting.
Upping the ante over its “vote chori” allegations against the ECI, the Congress said it had been “deeply disappointing” and demanded that the poll body must immediately demonstrate that it was not operating under the BJP’s shadow.
Mr Kharge accused the BJP of attempting to weaponise the SIR of the electoral rolls process for “vote chori.” “We held a comprehensive strategy review with AICC general secretaries, AICC in-charges, PCCs, CLPs, and AICC secretaries from the States/UTs where the SIR process is underway. The Congress Party is unequivocally committed to safeguarding the integrity of the electoral rolls,” Mr Kharge said on X (formerly Twitter) after he chaired the meeting.
At a time when public confidence in democratic institutions was already strained, the Election Commission’s conduct during the SIR process has been “deeply disappointing,” he said. “It must immediately demonstrate that it is not operating under the BJP’s shadow and it remembers its Constitutional oath and allegiance to the people of India, not to any ruling party,” Mr Kharge said.
“We firmly believe that the BJP is attempting to weaponise the SIR process for vote chori. And if the ECI chooses to look the other way, that failure is not just administrative — it becomes a complicity of silence,” the Congress chief said. “Our workers, BLOs, and District/City/Block Presidents will therefore remain relentlessly vigilant. We will expose every attempt, however subtle, to delete genuine voters or insert bogus ones,” Mr Kharge said. The Congress will not allow democratic safeguards to be eroded by partisan misuse of institutions, he asserted.
The ECI on Tuesday said more than 50 crore of the nearly 51 crore electors in the nine States and three UTs have received enumeration forms under the ongoing SIR of voter list. In its daily SIR bulletin, the poll authority said 50.11 crore enumeration forms have been distributed in the 12 States and UTs, that is 98.32% of the 50.99 crore electors have received the partly filled forms.
The States and UTs are: Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Lakshadweep.
Among these, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala, and West Bengal will go to the polls in 2026. In Assam, where elections are also due in 2026, the ECI on Monday announced a ‘special revision’ of electoral rolls, but not SIR. Phase II of the SIR exercise began on November 4 with the enumeration stage and will continue till December 4. Last week, Rahul Gandhi called the Bihar poll results surprising, and claimed that the election was not fair from the very beginning.
Mr Gandhi also said the Congress and the INDIA bloc would conduct an in-depth review of the outcomes. The Congress also claimed that the results, without a doubt, reflect “vote chori on a gigantic scale — masterminded by the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the ECI.”
Meanwhile, the senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor continued to embarrass the party by showering uncalled for praises on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On Tuesday, he invited another spat with his party leadership by writing on a post on “X” that he considered himself to be fortunate to be present at a gathering where Mr Modi delivered a speech on “India’s constructive impatience for development and pushed strongly for (the growth) of a post-colonial mindset.”
Visuals from the event showed Tharoor sitting amicably with BJP leader and former Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to his left and former Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on his right. The Prime Minister, he said, “emphasised that India is no longer just an ’emerging market’ but an ’emerging model’ for the world” which had taken note of its economic resilience in having survived global events like the pandemic and is navigating through the conflict in Ukraine.
“PM Modi said he had been accused of being in ‘election mode’ all the time… but he was really in an ’emotional mode’ to redress the problems of the people,” Tharoor said, recounting what the PM said in his speech, which focused on colonialism’s impact on education in India.
Tharoor said a key part of the PM’s speech was dedicated to “overturning Macaulay’s 200-year legacy of ‘slave mentality’ (i.e., a colonial mindset).” The PM, he said, appealed for a 10-year national mission to restore pride in India’s heritage, languages, and knowledge systems. “On the whole, the address served as an economic outlook and a cultural call to action, urging the nation to be restless for progress. Glad to have been in the audience…” Tharoor declared.
The PM was referring to Thomas Babington Macaulay, a 19th century British MP who came to India in 1834, and is credited with the introduction of the Western education system – which included making English the official language of instruction in all schools – in this country.
“In India’s traditional education system, we were taught to take pride in our culture. Our education emphasised skill along with learning. That is why Macaulay decided to break the backbone of India’s education system… and he succeeded,” the Prime Minister said.
“Macaulay ensured that the British language and British thinking received greater recognition during that period, and India paid the price for it for centuries to come,” he said, declaring the British politician “broke our self-confidence and filled us with a sense of inferiority.”
Tharoor’s praise for the Prime Minister’s speech is unlikely to be received favourably by other Congress leaders, particularly since this is not the first time he has spoken glowingly of the PM. Ties between the four-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the Congress have deteriorated sharply over the past few months, specifically from the time he was chosen as one of the opposition faces in government delegations sent to friendly nations in the aftermath of the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack.
