Rahul Gandhi tells Delhi rally CEC Gyanesh Kumar will face jail for “treason” as BJP dismisses gathering over empty chairs
At the INDIA bloc’s “Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” rally at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, Rahul Gandhi said Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar would be removed and jailed for treason over alleged vote theft, and that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah would face legal action — claims the BJP sharply rejected, pointing to thousands of empty chairs.
India’s opposition INDIA bloc turned its day-long Delhi protest into a direct confrontation with the country’s election chief on Sunday, as Congress leader Rahul Gandhi told a large rally at Ramlila Maidan that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar would be removed from his post and jailed for “treason” over alleged vote theft. Gandhi also said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah would face legal action, in the sharpest language yet in the opposition’s campaign against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The rally, held under the banner “Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” — save the vote, save the country — was the culmination of a protest that began with senior opposition leaders travelling in an open bus from Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence to the venue. Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, and leaders of the Left parties were among those who marched to Ramlila Maidan, where supporters and party workers had gathered from across the capital. The bloc is demanding Kumar’s removal, alleging electoral irregularities in the revision of voter lists.
The ground for Sunday’s speeches had been laid a day earlier, when the bloc carried out a symbolic “public impeachment” of Kumar, unanimously adopting a motion by a show of hands on Saturday. According to The Hindu’s live coverage, the bloc levelled six charges against him, including conspiring with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to steal elections, deleting 13.2 crore voters through the SIR, and acting at the behest of Modi and Shah. Those charges frame the rally not as a routine protest but as an attempt to put the Election Commission itself on trial in public.
Gandhi’s speech built directly on that case. Addressing the crowd, he claimed that 15 per cent of India’s voters had been removed from electoral rolls after the 2024 elections, which he said made that election “illegal” and “stolen”. He repeated the bloc’s allegation that votes had been stolen in Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Karnataka as well as in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, accusing the BJP of using electronic voting machines and manipulating voter lists by deleting and adding names. The Week reported his words on Kumar in full: the election chief, he said, would be removed and jailed for treason, while Modi and Shah would face legal action.
Gandhi paired the attack with a pointed reply to Shah. “Amit Shah said Narendra Modi is not going anywhere. I would tell you Narendra Modi cannot go anywhere; even if he wants to go, we will not let him,” he said, according to The Week. At the same time, he insisted he harboured no personal enmity towards Modi, Shah or Kumar, and said the opposition would defend the Constitution through “love, not hatred”, rejecting violence while continuing its fight. He described the turnout as the “voice of youth, farmers, labourers” against alleged vote theft — a claim that became, within hours, the focus of the BJP’s counter-attack.
Other opposition leaders used the same platform to widen the argument. Kharge said the bloc would not be intimidated by the police, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate or other government agencies, accused the BJP of trying to divide people and “snatch” their votes, and called for support to remove the Modi government in order to save democracy. Banerjee said Bengal was a victim of the SIR and that her party would fight but not surrender, adding: “We will save democracy and bring it back.” Yadav called Ramlila Maidan the “Haldighati of democracy”, alleged voter-list manipulation in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, and said the BJP was using the Election Commission because it could not win people’s support.
The BJP’s response was swift and focused on two points: the size of the crowd and the timeline of Kumar’s appointment. Party MP and national spokesperson Sambit Patra told reporters that nearly 40 per cent of Ramlila Maidan was vacant, despite the opposition’s claim that 10 lakh people would attend. “Out of 28,000 chairs, around 5,000–7,000 were empty at 3:30–4 PM. This is the reality behind Congress’s claim of 10 lakh attendees,” he said, calling the rally a “spectacle of chaos” and, in Outlook’s account, a “super flop” event. He disputed the claim that the 2024 polls were rigged on the grounds that Kumar was not even in the picture at the time, having become Chief Election Commissioner only in 2025.
Patra pressed that timeline point into a challenge. “If the 2024 election was illegal, then Rahul Gandhi is also an illegal Leader of Opposition, and all his MPs are illegal. If an election is illegal, challenge it in court. You cannot declare an election illegal two and a half years later at Ramlila Maidan,” he said. Union minister J.P. Nadda went further, calling the rally a “foolish drama” that would be the final nail in the Congress’s political future, accusing Gandhi of plotting anarchy and destabilising an elected government, and criticising the choice of 1 November — the anniversary of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots — for the rally. Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde accused the bloc of spreading a “fake narrative” and defaming Modi.
The dispute over the rally also spilled into an argument about Delhi’s traders. Shah said Delhi traders had repeatedly urged the Congress to postpone the 1 November rally until after Diwali, citing concerns over festival-season business, and the Chamber of Trade and Industry had estimated that up to 10 lakh people and 15,000–20,000 vehicles could converge on central Delhi, with traders warning of disruption across 20 central markets. Gandhi, in a post on X, said he had urged rally-goers to shop at small local stores, and alleged that on reaching Connaught Place he found the BJP had “forcibly shut down every single shop”. Delhi Police had imposed traffic restrictions and diversions across parts of the capital from 10 am to 5 pm for the march and rally.
What neither side’s speeches settle is the underlying factual dispute. The opposition’s figures — 13.2 crore deletions, 15 per cent of voters removed — are allegations made at the rally and in the symbolic impeachment motion, not findings of a court or of the Election Commission, and the reporting so far does not record a fresh Election Commission response to Sunday’s specific treason and jail claims. Equally, the BJP’s crowd figures — 40 per cent vacant, thousands of empty chairs — are its own assessment of the venue, contested by the opposition’s description of a large turnout. Readers should therefore treat both sets of numbers as claims in a political argument, not as independently verified counts.
What may happen next will test whether the rally was a set-piece protest or the start of a longer campaign. Possibilities include the opposition pressing its demand for Kumar’s removal through Parliament or the courts, the Election Commission responding to the specific charges, further state-level protests over the SIR as revision work continues, and continued BJP counter-campaigns questioning the opposition’s evidence and turnout claims. For now, the rally has sharpened the lines of the argument: the opposition says the vote itself is under threat, the government’s party says the opposition is inventing a crisis it cannot prove, and the SIR — the revision exercise at the centre of it all — remains the contested ground between them.
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