Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 7: After a Brazilian woman’s picture did the rounds on social media, a fresh controversy has emerged on Friday in continuation of the Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s ‘vote theft’ charges after a Pune woman’s photo with an inked finger during the Bihar elections Phase 1 voting has gone viral and added to the Congress’s allegations that the BJP has been stealing votes to win the elections in the country.
This is the second example that Congress workers are flagging to back their allegations, after a Brazilian woman’s photo went viral for being featured in the Haryana voter list. Congress workers soon dug up older photos of her voting in Pune and claimed this was an example of how voters from one state voted in another.
Identified as Urrmi, a lawyer from Pune, on her X account, the woman posted her selfie on Thursday showing that she cast her vote in Pune during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and again in first phase of Bihar Assembly polls on Thursday. Two separate posts from her X account show her posing with an inked finger after casting her vote, but both pictures are from two different elections and two different states.
“Go Vote, Pune! Voted for development, voted for a clean governance, voted for a Modi-fied India!” the X user posted on May 13, 2024. However, another post from November 6, 2025 reads: Voted for a Modi-fied India! Jaai ke Vote daali, Bihar!”
“Multi-state voting is the new startup. Investor: BJP. Product: Fake mandate,” said Reshma Alam, a Congress social media coordinator. Maharashtra Congress spokesperson Atul Londhe Patil shared screenshots of the two posts and captioned it: I will vote in Maharashtra in the Lok Sabha. I will vote in Bihar in the Vidhan Sabha. I will steal votes for Modi.”
However, the woman later made another post after her November 6 post went viral, clarifying that she never said she voted on the day of Bihar elections. “Okay, this was just for motivation. I never said I voted today — I said I voted. And everyone knows it was in Maharashtra. So calm down! Motivated enough? Now your turn, Bihar. Go vote!!” she wrote.
In a similar case, the Aam Aadmi Party also accused some BJP leaders of casting votes in two states. AAP’s Delhi president Saurabh Bharadwaj alleged that BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Rakesh Sinha, Delhi BJP Purvanchal Morcha president Santosh Ojha and party functionary Nagendra Kumar each cast votes twice. While there was no official response from the BJP, one of the leaders questioned by the AAP claimed that he had shifted his vote from Delhi to Bihar.
“Baseless and morally contested allegations are being levelled against me by liars and morally degraded leaders of Aam Aadmi Party, Congress and their ilk. My name is only on Bihar’s electoral roll. It was earlier in Delhi’s electoral roll, and I got it deleted through a procedure established by law,” said Rakesh Sinha in a post.
The Congress leader Gandhi had made similar allegations about the Haryana elections on Thursday, claiming that a woman with multiple names had voted in 10 different booths. Congress workers shared the lawyer’s photo en masse to justify those allegations.
Earlier, a Brazilian woman’s photo had gone viral after Rahul Gandhi claimed it was used in 22 entries in the Haryana voter list. The photo later turned out to be of Larissa Nery, a hairdresser. She had posed for a photographer friend eight years back, unaware that the picture would become the epicentre of a massive political row miles away in another country.
Even as the Election Commission of India (ECI) promptly rejected Mr Gandhi’s allegations as “unfounded,” independent inquiries made by some media houses found some discrepancies in the ECI’s Haryana voters roll. Besides the Brazilian hairdresser, inquiry also found another voter whose photographs appeared against multiple voter IDs, 223 in this case.
The voter in this case is 75-year-old Charanjit Kaur, who lives in Dhakola village in Haryana’s Ambala district. Kaur said she voted in last year’s Assembly elections just once. She also said everyone told her photo had been displayed on several voter ID cards. “When I went to cast my vote, the photo (on the list) was mine but it was against someone else’s name,” Kaur said.
She said she told her son about it. Her son, Tejinder Singh, who contested the village sarpanch election, said he filed a complaint with officials, stating his mother’s photo had been placed in multiple lists but with incorrect names and addresses. It seemed to be a printing mistake, he said, but no action was taken. Singh also blamed incorrect voting lists for his electoral defeat.
NDTV also spoke to other voters in Haryana and uncovered striking anomalies in rolls. One example given by Gandhi was of a woman called Saroj, whose voter ID also carried another’s photo – that of the ‘Brazilian model’. While she was not at home, her mother, Kalavati, told NDTV her daughter had married and now lives in Bhiwani. She votes there, the mother said.
In the same constituency, a woman called Pinky said she too found another woman’s photo against her voter ID. But, she told NDTV, she still managed to vote by showing her Aadhaar card. In her case, the photo against her voter number was that of another woman, not the ‘Brazilian model’.
In Malikpur village in Sonipat district, for example, several voters – including four members of one family – mysteriously disappeared from the list. One voter, Anjali Tyagi, said she voted in the April-May federal election last year, but could not vote in the state poll five months later.