New Delhi [India], August 8 : Labelling Rahul Gandhi's claims as 'baseless", the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Friday said that the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in Lok Sabha is trying to "sensationalise" the issue instead of availing the legal processes.
The poll body in a statement said that Rahul Gandhi repeated a "tired" script.
"At his recent press conference, Rahul Gandhi repeated a tired script. In 2018, it was then Kamal Nath, the then President of MPCC; today, it's the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha playing the same tune. In 2018, they tried to mislead the Supreme Court by producing documents from a private website to demonstrate that there are mistakes in the electoral rolls in as much as the same face was shown again for as many as 36 voters. Wherein, in reality, the defects were rectified around 4 months ago and the copy of the same was supplied to the party. This was made ground to seek the searchable pdf format for electoral rolls. The Court refused to accept the prayer of Kamal Nath," ECI said.
The ECI further said that the name of Aditya Srivastava, which was alleged to be in three different States, was rectified months ago.
"Now, in 2025, they, being aware that the same trick cannot be played in the Court, tried to mislead the people by claiming irregularities in the electoral rolls, inter alia, that the same names are occurring at different places. In fact, the name of Aditya Srivastava, which was alleged to be in three different States, was rectified months ago," it added.
The poll body further alleged that the Lok Sabha LoP has no respect for the Supreme Court of India's decisions.
ECI also asked Congress MP Rahul Gandhi to sign the declaration by Chief Electoral Officers of Maharashtra and Karnataka or apologise for his "absurd" allegations.
"The Kamal Nath judgement gives a settled position with respect to the machine-readable document and raising the same issues repeatedly shows that Mr Gandhi has no respect for the Supreme Court of India's decisions. Law provides a specific procedure for both making objections to the roll and for making appeals. Instead of availing himself of the legal processes, he tried to sensationalise the issue by making baseless claims in the media. It is a settled proposition that if law requires a certain thing to happen in a certain manner, then it should be done in that manner only and not in any other manner. Therefore, if Rahul Gandhi believes in his analysis and believes that his allegations against ECI are true, he should have respect for the law and sign the Declaration or Apologise to the Nation for raising absurd allegations against ECI," ECI added.