The Election Commission should have ordered an investigation into the allegations of vote theft raised by Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, instead of “shouting” at him in “objectionable and offensive” language, former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi told PTI on Sunday.

While several of the terms used by Gandhi, such as “hydrogen bomb”, were “political rhetoric”, the allegations he had raised should be investigated, Quraishi said during an interview with the news agency.

On September 1, Gandhi said his party will soon release a “hydrogen bomb” of evidence on alleged voter fraud, claiming that after the disclosure, Prime Minister Narendra Modi would “not be able to show his face to the country”.

Speaking at the concluding event of his Voter Adhikar Yatra in Patna, Gandhi repeated his allegations that votes were “stolen” in Maharashtra during the Assembly election and in Karnataka’s Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency during the 2024 parliamentary elections.

The Election Commission, however, has rejected these allegations. On August 14, it described Gandhi’s claims regarding Mahadevapura as “false and misleading”.

Two days later, the poll panel said that political parties or individuals who had concerns about electoral rolls prepared in the past should have raised them during the claims and objections period.

It did not name any political party or person in the statement.

The Election Commission added that if problems with the voter rolls had been flagged “at the right time through the right channels”, any “genuine” mistakes would have been corrected by the sub-divisional magistrate or electoral registration officer.

On Sunday, Quraishi said that Gandhi was the leader of Opposition, not a “man on the street”.

“He is representing millions of people, he is voicing the opinion of millions of people and to say to him, ‘give an affidavit otherwise we will do this and do that’, the body language and the language used is both objectionable and offensive,” the former chief election commissioner told PTI.

On August 7, Gandhi said that his party had spent six months examining the electoral rolls in Mahadevapura Assembly segment and found discrepancies in more than one lakh names.

He alleged that this was evidence of the Election Commission having colluded with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Congress leader claimed that the electoral rolls included 11,965 duplicate entries, 40,009 voters with fake or invalid addresses, 10,454 “bulk voters” registered in a single address, 4,132 voters with invalid photographs and 33,692 voters in whose cases there had allegedly been misuse of Form 6.

The Election Commission’s Form 6 is an application document for registering new voters.

Gandhi and the Congress have also repeatedly alleged that there was “industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of our national institutions” in the Maharashtra polls held in November.

The BJP-led alliance had defeated the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition, which includes the Congress, in the polls.

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