Following the Oppositions’ charge, the clarified that no party has approached it for inclusion or removal of names in the draft voters’ list in the state.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday launched a counterattack on Congress and claimed Sonia Gandhi had been illegally added to the voter list 45 years ago, before she was an Indian citizen. The Congress has accused the BJP of ‘colluding’ with the Election Commission to commit voter fraud.
Ex-Union Minister Anurag Thakur claimed ex-Congress boss – born Sonia Maino in Italy in 1946 – was added on the list from 1980 to 1982, a year before she was an Indian citizen.
In a long Twitter post, BJP leader Amit Malviya claimed that Sonia Gandhi’s name first appeared on the rolls in 1980 — three years before she became an Indian citizen and while she still held Italian citizenship.
The post read:
Sonia Gandhi’s tryst with India’s voters’ list is riddled with glaring violations of electoral law. This perhaps explains Rahul Gandhi’s fondness for regularising ineligible and illegal voters, and his opposition to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
Her name first appeared on the rolls in 1980 — three years before she became an Indian citizen and while she still held Italian citizenship. At the time, the Gandhi family lived at 1, Safdarjung Road, the official residence of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Until then, the voters registered at that address were Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, and Maneka Gandhi. In 1980, the electoral rolls of the New Delhi parliamentary constituency were revised with January 1, 1980, as the qualifying date. During this revision, Sonia Gandhi’s name was added, appearing at serial number 388 in polling station 145.
This entry was a clear violation of the law, which requires a person to be an Indian citizen to be registered as a voter. Following an outcry in 1982, her name was deleted from the list — only to reappear in 1983.
But even her reinstatement raised serious questions. In the fresh revision of the electoral rolls that year, Sonia Gandhi was listed at serial number 236 in polling station 140. The qualifying date for registration was January 1, 1983 — yet she was granted Indian citizenship only on April 30, 1983.
In other words, Sonia Gandhi’s name entered the electoral rolls twice without meeting the basic citizenship requirement — first as an Italian citizen in 1980, and then again in 1983, months before she legally became a citizen of India. We are not even asking why it took her 15 years after marrying Rajiv Gandhi to accept Indian citizenship.
If this isn’t blatant electoral malpractice, what is?
What the Opposition is alleging?
Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, also made explosive claims of a “huge criminal fraud” in polls through collusion between the BJP and the Election Commission. Alleging that a “vote chori model” was being used in many constituencies across the country, Gandhi said that the judiciary needs to get involved in this because “the democracy that we love so much, does not exist anymore”.
