New Delhi [India], September 12 : Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former Rajya Sabha MP GVL Narasimha Rao on Friday hit out at Congress, saying that the opposition party's efforts to blame the ruling party in the centre for its downfall were "completely false and fraudulent."
"The recent efforts by the Congress party to blame the entire downfall of the Congress on the BJP and the Prime Ministership of Modi are an attempt to show that Congress votes have declined after he became the PM, and that there is an attempt to steal Congress votes somehow. These are completely false, fraudulent allegations," Rao told ANI.
Highlighting his analysis of past election trends, Rao said that Congress declined from its peak performance of 404 seats in 1984 to merely 44 seats in 2014.
"However, this required some amount of authentic data to show that what Rahul Gandhi claimed is completely fake. So, I looked at election trends and results from 1984 until Modi became the PM in 2014. The results are very startling. Congress declined from its peak performance of 404 seats in 1984 to merely 44 seats in 2014," the BJP leader said.
"Congress votes came down from 49.1 per cent to 19.5 per cent in 2014. Congress party has to look somewhere else if they want to call anybody who took away Congress votes," he added.
Rao further took a swipe at Congress, asking whether those who "wiped Congress off the political maps" would be labelled as "vote thieves".
"The first person who caused this massive vote loss to the Congress party is former PM VP Singh. Would Rahul Gandhi dare to call him 'Vote Chor? Then several leaders across different states, be it Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati in UP, Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar, Stalin and Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu, Jyoti Basu and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal - all of them have wiped the Congress off the political map of their respective states," he said.
Earlier, Rahul Gandhi reiterated his claims of providing "explosive" evidence of alleged vote theft in the previously held assembly elections.
Speaking to reporters, Gandhi asserted that votes being stolen was a "fact".
"We are about to give you dynamic and explosive evidence. The slogan 'vote chor, gaddi chor' is being echoed across the country. The fire is spreading since it is the truth. It is a fact that governments are being formed by stealing votes. We guarantee that we will be providing you with the proofs," he added.
Rahul Gandhi, in a press conference on August 7, levelled serious allegations against the Election Commission of India (ECI), accusing it of direct involvement in large-scale voter fraud, with the Congress having "open-and-shut proof" of the alleged theft.