Fadnavis Hits Back At Rahul Gandhi Over 'Match-Fixing' Allegation In Maharashtra Polls, Says 'One Whom Public Rejects, Rejects The Mandate'

Hitting back at Rahul Gandhi for his claim of "match-fixing" in the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has dismissed the Congress leader's allegations and said the "one whom the public rejects, rejects the mandate", NDTV reported.

Fadnavis' response comes a day after Rahul Gandhi’s op-ed in The Indian Express on Saturday (7 June), where he raised doubts about the fairness of the Maharashtra polls after the Maha Vikas Aghadi, comprising of Congress, Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar faction of NCP, suffered a major defeat.

The Mahayuti alliance—comprising the BJP, Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, and Ajit Pawar’s NCP—won 235 of 288 seats.

The BJP alone bagged 132 seats, its highest tally ever in Maharashtra.

In a pointed breakdown, Rahul Gandhi, now Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, described the alleged electoral irregularities in the Maharashtra polls in a five-step manner.

"Step 1: Rig the panel for appointing the Election Commission, Step 2: Add fake voters to the roll, Step 3: Inflate voter turnout, Step 4: Target the bogus voting exactly where BJP needs to win, Step 5: Hide the evidence," Gandhi wrote in a post on X that accompanied a cutout of his 7 June op-ed.

In the op-ed, Gandhi admitted he hasn’t doubted every Indian election, but has done so “often enough,”.

"I am not talking of small-scale cheating, but of industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of our national institutions," he wrote.

"But if some earlier election outcomes seemed odd, the outcome of the 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections is glaringly strange. The scale of rigging was so desperate that, despite all efforts to conceal it, tell-tale evidence has emerged from official statistics, without reliance on any nonofficial source, revealing a step-by-step playbook," he added.

He said that "rigging is like match-fixing - the fixing side might win a game, but irreparable damage is done to institutions and to people's faith in the result."

"Match-fixed elections are a poison for any democracy," Gandhi said.

Hours after his X post, the Election Commission re-released a document it had issued in April this year and said his allegations are "completely absurd".

Fadnavis responded to Rahul Gandhi's op-ed with an op-ed in a Marathi daily.

"If you cannot convince people, then confuse them. This is the policy that Rahul Gandhi is adopting," Fadnavis wrote in a Marathi daily on Sunday (8 June).

He alleged that Congress is tarnishing the image of democracy by blaming the Electronic Voting Machine after being rejected by the people.

"It has now become a habit for the opposition parties to raise questions on the EVM in every election in Maharashtra. All petitions against the EVM have been dismissed by the Supreme Court," Fadnavis wrote.

Fadnavis also said that Gandhi is a leader "who cannot accept failure".

"Are EVMs right in the elections in which the Congress government wins?" he asked. 

"Respect the mandate. The public is watching everyone. Now, excuses will not work, and the accountability will be fixed," he concluded.

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