Karnataka minister KN Rajanna resigns day after his comments on Rahul Gandhi’s ‘vote theft’ charge

Karnataka Minister for Cooperation KN Rajanna resigned from the state Cabinet on Monday, The Indian Express reported.

This came a day after Rajanna told reporters that the purported discrepancies in the voter list, alleged by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to have occurred in the Mahadevapura Assembly segment of the Bengaluru Central parliamentary constituency, took place despite the Congress being in power in the state.

He reportedly said that when the voter list was being prepared, Congress leaders remained silent instead of raising objections at the draft stage.

“These irregularities did take place,” the newspaper quoted Rajanna as saying. “It is a shame that we did not monitor it.”

On August 7, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that his party had spent six months examining the electoral rolls in the Assembly constituency in central Bengaluru and found discrepancies in 1,00,250 names.

He alleged that this was evidence of the Election Commission having colluded with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Gandhi claimed that the electoral rolls included 11,965 duplicate entries, 40,009 voters with fake or invalid addresses, 10,454 “bulk voters” registered in a single address, 4,132 voters with invalid photographs and 33,692 voters in whose cases there had allegedly been misuse of Form 6.

The Election Commission’s Form 6 is an application document for registering new voters.

On Friday, Gandhi urged the Karnataka government to investigate the alleged voter fraud in the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency.

“The Karnataka government must investigate this crime and take action,” Gandhi had said at a protest rally in Bengaluru on Friday. “Election Commission officers who added thousands of fake people into the voter list must be questioned and bring out the truth of Mahadevapura.”

Karnataka has had a Congress government since May 2023.

He had claimed then that more than one seat in Karnataka had been “stolen”, adding that the Congress should have won 15 to 16 seats in the state in the Lok Sabha elections but secured only nine.