Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s exposé on major discrepancies in the electoral rolls in a single assembly segment that falls within the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat has opened a can of worms.The painstaking effort that the Congress team undertook over the last six months to highlight multi-layered discrepancies in the electoral rolls of the Mahadevapura assembly segment is a part of its continuing campaign that has questioned the Election Commission (EC)’s neutrality.Interestingly, Mahadevapura is the only segment from where the BJP curiously took an unassailable lead in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in spite of losing in the seven other assembly segments within that parliamentary constituency to the Congress.Eventually, the unnaturally high number of votes that the BJP polled in Mahadevapura was enough to give it a lead of nearly 33,000 votes over the Congress in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency.Given the fact that the electoral rolls that the Congress has used are official documents of the EC, the evidence pointing out the alleged election fraud that Gandhi shared on Thursday (August 7) is the most concrete that the party has shared until today. These discrepancies point towards a larger malaise in the electoral system that only the EC can address convincingly.Unfortunately, however, the EC instead of holding back and taking a closer look at what Gandhi has pointed out went on to dare the Congress leader to make these accusations on oath. The EC’s response will neither alleviate the fears that have surrounded the sanctity of elections in India of late, nor will it do anything to elevate the poll body’s autonomous stature in the eyes of the public.Rather, its refusal to take criticism in the right vein will only empower Gandhi’s assertions. While pointing out duplications, fake addresses, the misuse of Form 6 to induct fake voters, and a poorly enumerated voter list in which voters’ details in Mahadevapura clearly looked forged, Gandhi accused the EC of “vote chori”, meaning a theft of votes, and declared that the poll body was an “umpire” that is in the “other team” – that is, the BJP. He accused the EC of working at the behest of the BJP, clearly questioning its neutrality.Some of what Gandhi shared was stark. He said that after six months of physically verifying the hard copies of Mahadevapura’s electoral rolls, the Congress team found 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 voters with fake addresses, 10,452 bulk voters documented in single addresses, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters who, according to him, had misused Form 6 (a document required to enrol new voters) to be inducted in the electoral rolls.He showed how one voter was enlisted in different polling booths in the constituency. He also presented three instances in which 80 voters were listed in a single address and 46 voters belonged to a one-room house. He showed photos of those addresses which the Congress team claimed to have verified and found none of those voters living there.The most clinching evidence of discrepancies in the voter list was one instance where 68 people were enrolled as voters from a brewery named “153 Biere Club” in Bengaluru, but none of them could be found there.These are serious allegations and should concern anyone who swears by the fairness of Indian elections. Gandhi believes that the fallacies in the electoral rolls cost his party the Bangalore Central seat, as it won from all assembly segments of the constituency except Mahadevapura, where the BJP took a lead of over 1.1 lakh votes.Gandhi has called the instances at Mahadevapura a “model” of “vote chori”, and said he “suspected” that the same may be happening in other states, too. He claimed that the Congress’s suspicions over unfair elections grew after it lost the assembly elections in Haryana and Maharashtra, both states where it had performed much better in the Lok Sabha elections and where the party’s own opinion polls had speculated victories.“The ball is in the EC’s court,” Gandhi said. Indeed it is. The onus clearly is on the EC to take these allegations into account, examine them and give clear-cut answers instead of getting into a verbal duel with Gandhi or any other opposition leader.Gandhi’s allegations on Thursday come after he made similar allegations regarding a few constituencies in Maharashtra. The EC still hasn’t addressed them.Notably, Gandhi, while responding to a question, said that when it comes to elections in India, the debate is no longer whether they should be conducted using electronic voting machines or ballot papers, but about the EC’s independence. If the EC gets its act straight, then elections will be free and fair, he claimed.Although the Congress had publicly made similar allegations before, this may be the first time where its tallest leader has unequivocally trained his guns at the apex poll body, casting doubts about its independence like never before.As a constitutional body, the EC can’t merely sit back and watch the drama. It has to address these concerns seriously and with interest before they become unmanageable.To do that, however, it has to abandon its aggression. One has seen how the EC attacked the opposition for raising questions on its functioning, with the chief election commissioner going to the extent of echoing the BJP’s argument that a “false narrative” was being concocted to delegitimise the commission.A few months ago, the EC changed the rules to prevent any sharing of CCTV footage of polling booths when the Congress demanded the same for its verification exercise, arguing that sharing video footage will lead to unnecessary political controversy.Recently, it put on a similar belligerence against the judiciary when it responded with evident hostility to the Supreme Court’s suggestion that it should consider usual identity proofs like Aadhaar, electors’ photo ID or ration cards for the “special intensive revision” exercise in Bihar.The EC has to realise that it can’t isolate itself from the current political climate in which every institution is having its autonomy questioned or is under pressure from political bosses. There is only one way out for the EC to absolve itself from this spiralling controversy, which is to take down each and every allegation thrown at it scientifically and calmly.For now, the EC could make public digital imprints of electoral rolls for verification, as demanded by Gandhi on Thursday, and also release CCTV footage of polling if sought by opposition parties.Unless that happens, Gandhi’s concerns will worry every democratic-minded citizen.