Ravi Shankar Prasad urges Rahul Gandhi to quit MP seat after election fraud claims

Senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad told a gathering at the Punjab BJP’s ‘Zakhm 84 De’ conclave on Wednesday that Rahul Gandhi should resign from the Lok Sabha after the opposition figure called the 2024 general election illegal. Prasad criticised Gandhi for questioning the special intensive review of voter lists, saying the Congress chief seemed unaware of how the process works. He challenged Gandhi, "You became a member of Parliament in 2024; will you step down, and will every other Congress MP follow suit? Will the Congress government in Himachal Pradesh resign, and will the ministries in Telangana and Karnataka also quit?". He added that the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, was not part of the Election Commission in 2024, and warned that no one had done the homework on the facts. Prasad claimed that every political party in Punjab had backed the special intensive review and praised its outcome. The backdrop to this exchange was a rally in Delhi on November 1, where the INDIA bloc accused the BJP of “vote theft”. Gandhi had alleged that the Election Commission deleted 15% of voters from the rolls before the 2024 polls, while the vote difference between the NDA and the INDIA bloc was only about 3%. He also said CEC Gyanesh Kumar would face treason charges and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah would not escape legal scrutiny.

Context

The special intensive review is a periodic cleaning of electoral rolls aimed at removing duplicate or ineligible entries. Disagreements over the scale of deletions are common in Indian elections and often become a political flashpoint, especially when the overall vote margin is narrow.