Umpire is playing for the other team: Rahul Gandhi fires a fresh salvo at Election Commission

The Leader of Opposition raised question marks on the sanctity of voters' list in the country by claiming unlawful inclusion of names.

New Delhi: Merely going back to paper ballots by replacing Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) will not end electoral "fraud" if the umpire is "compromised", top Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Thursday, as he launched a scathing attack on the Election Commission (EC).

Putting question mark on the sanctity of voters' list in the country by claiming unlawful inclusion of names, Rahul also said it is a "crime that is being committed against the Constitution and the Indian flag". He said his message to the EC is that they are "not in the business of destroying Indian democracy but in the business of protecting it".

At a press conference where he claimed to have "evidence" of voter list manipulation in Mahadevapura Assembly segment, he said the question is not about EVM or paper ballot if the EC is compromised. "The umpire is (playing) for the other team," he said.

Asked whether he would link the alleged discrepancies in voters list and reignite the protest against EVMs, Rahul said he was not going into conjecture. He said he is talking about things on which he has evidence on irregularities in voter inclusion. Similarly, he said there is voter deletion and voter suppression but there is no data at present to support it.

"We see there is a pattern, we are absolutely convinced that this crime is being done on a huge scale across the country in state after state after state. CCTV footage and voter list are evidence in crime and the EC is trying to destroy it...I want the nation to know that there is a huge criminal fraud being perpetrated on this country. It's being done by the Election Commission and the party in power and we've given you undoubtable proof," he said.

"If the Election Commission now does not give us electronic voter data of the last 10-15 years, and if it doesn't share the CCTV footage, they are partaking in the crime...What is the difference between us and other places, it is the democracy, it's gone... if this is true," he said.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the PM with a slender majority and needed to steal only 25 seats to stay in power," he said, adding the BJP won 25 seats in the Lok Sabha polls with a margin of less than 33,000 votes.