On August 7, at the Congress headquarters in new Delhi, party leader Rahul Gandhi stood in a room filled with cameras and anticipation, holding what he described as proof of India’s gravest democratic crisis. The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha raised a spiral-bound stack of papers, culled from a seven-foot pile of electoral rolls, and levelled a dramatic charge: the Election Commission of India (ECI) was overseeing “vote chori”, an orchestrated theft within voter lists. As evidence, he pointed to the rolls of Karnataka’s Mahadevapura assembly seat, under the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency, alleging that over 100,000 fraudulent votes had been inserted in those rolls via systematic manipulation, skewing the 2024 Lok Sabha election result in favour of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).