A Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi told the petitioner, Advocate Rohit Pandey, to pursue the matter before the Election Commission of India.
Published Oct 13, 2025 | 1:52 PM ⚊ Updated Oct 13, 2025 | 1:52 PM
Gandhi had on 7 August, released data regarding the 'theft' of more than one lakh votes.
Synopsis: The petitioner claimed that he had independently verified Gandhi’s allegation of ‘vote theft’ in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment and found sufficient prima facie material to establish that the allegations reveal a systemic attempt to dilute and distort the value of lawful votes, thereby necessitating urgent intervention by the court.
The Supreme Court on Monday, 13 October, dismissed a petition that sought the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT), headed by a former judge, to probe Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s allegations regarding large-scale voter list manipulation in the Bengaluru Central constituency during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
A Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi told the petitioner, Advocate Rohit Pandey, to pursue the matter before the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The petitioner claimed that he had independently verified Gandhi’s allegation of ‘vote theft’ in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment and “found sufficient prima facie material to establish that the allegations reveal a systemic attempt to dilute and distort the value of lawful votes, thereby necessitating urgent intervention by this Hon’ble Court in the larger public interest,” LiveLaw reported.
Pandey had also requested that during elections, the ECI should complete the collection of voting details and the archiving of CCTV footage.
The Public Interest Litigation also called for the publication of electoral rolls in accessible, machine-readable, and OCR-compliant formats, along with the release of rolls in a modern format suitable for electronic search. Separate directions to the Election Commission for this purpose have also been sought.
Gandhi had, on 7 August, released data regarding ‘theft’ of more than one lakh votes.
He accused the ECI of colluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to manipulate voter lists and swing results in favour of the ruling party.
The Congress leader further said his party had analysed the voters’ list and polling data from Mahadevapura and found irregularities in 1,00,250 votes. He also pointed to the addition of more than one crore new voters in Maharashtra after the Lok Sabha elections and before the State Assembly polls.
“The voter list is the property of the country. But the EC refuses to give us the complete list. They even rejected a request for a machine-readable version and instead gave us non-readable paper copies,” he said.
According to him, the BJP’s margin in Mahadevapura determined the outcome in Bengaluru Central. “In Mahadevapura, Congress polled 1,15,586 votes and the BJP 2,29,632, a margin of over 1.14 lakh. Congress won all other segments, but the BJP’s large margin here secured them the Lok Sabha seat,” he stated.
Ten days later on 17 August, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar refuted the charge, terming it “baseless” and said such claims “neither intimidate the ECI nor undermine the confidence of the voters.”
Kumar had then insisted that the Commission “stands, and will always stand, firmly with all the voters of India, whether rich or poor, elderly, women, youth, across all sections of society and all faiths, without discrimination.”
