New Delhi: The Election Commission of India (ECI) wrote to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on 12 June, inviting him for a meeting over his allegations of rigging of the Maharashtra assembly elections last year. Gandhi hasn’t responded to it yet, though.
The commission said the Congress had raised similar issues in November, to which the ECI had sent a detailed reply to the party in December 2024.
“All elections are conducted by the Election Commission of India strictly as per Electoral laws passed by the Parliament, Rules made therein and instructions issued by the Election Commission of India from time to time,” said the letter. “We presumed that any issue regarding conduct of elections would have already been raised through election petitions filed in the competent court of law by the INC candidates.”
The letter added that if Gandhi still had any issues regarding the process, he was welcome to write to the Commission, which was willing to meet him at a mutually convenient date and time to discuss this.
However, sources confirmed to ThePrint that no response had been received from Gandhi to the letter so far.
The letter followed soon after Rahul Gandhi called the results of the Maharashtra elections “glaringly strange” in an Indian Express column he wrote this month.
“The scale of rigging was so desperate that, despite all efforts to conceal it, tell-tale evidence has emerged from official statistics, without reliance on any nonofficial source, revealing a step-by-step playbook,” Rahul Gandhi wrote in the column, “Match-fixing Maharashtra”.
Soon after, sources within the ECI had called it “strange” that Gandhi had sought answers for his “same unfounded doubts again and again” despite the ECI’s response to the allegations last year to the Indian National Congress.
The ECI, in December 2024 and April this year, again rebutted similar charges by Rahul Gandhi. “It is not clear as to why Shri Rahul Gandhi is shying away from writing to EC in person by himself and get(ting) a reply,” the ECI sources had asserted.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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