Rahul Gandhi met seven Bihar voters wrongly declared dead and struck off electoral rolls.
Congress called it political disenfranchisement linked to voter list manipulation.
Meeting over tea comes before his August 17 ‘Vote Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday hosted a group of seven voters from Bihar for tea at his residence in Delhi, after they were mistakenly declared “dead” by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and removed from the draft electoral rolls published on August 1 as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
The voters, Ramikbal Ray, Harendra Ray, Lalmuni Devi, Vachiya Devi, Lalwati Devi, Punam Kumari, and Munna Kumar, all live in Raghopur, the constituency of former Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav.
Speaking on X, Gandhi described the meeting as a “unique experience to have tea with ‘dead people’” and thanked the Election Commission for the opportunity. In a four-minute video of the interaction, he asked the voters how they discovered they had been removed from the rolls.
One voter said they only learned about it after the EC released a draft list excluding 65 lakh names. “But I am alive. I have come to declare I am not dead,” he told Gandhi. Another pointed to an 85-year-old who had also been declared dead. A party worker accompanying the group said more voters were in similar situations but had not attended the meeting.
Congress criticised the EC for not publicly publishing the names of voters declared dead or migrated. The party said these seven voters represent only a fraction of those affected in two to three polling booths in Raghopur. “This is not a clerical error, it is political disenfranchisement in plain sight,” the statement read. Gandhi assured the voters he would not allow what he described as ‘vote chori’, or the stealing of votes.
The party linked the Bihar SIR exercise to earlier allegations of voter list manipulation in Karnataka and Maharashtra, suggesting a broader pattern of collusion between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Election Commission. “When the living are struck off as dead, the death certificate is issued to democracy itself,” the Congress statement said.
Separately, MPs from the INDIA bloc protested in the Parliament complex on Tuesday, wearing white T-shirts printed with “Minta Devi 124 Not Out,” referring to a first-time voter from Siwan district whose age was incorrectly listed as 124 in the voters’ list. The district administration attributed the error to a clerical mistake in the online application process.
