Congress leader shares 9-month-old video of Gadkari saying 350,000 names were deleted from voters’ list

Congress leader and former Maharashtra minister Yashomati Thakur shared the 28-second clip, drawing a parallel between allegations by Gadkari and Gandhi.

Mumbai: To bolster the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi’s claims of vote theft in Karnataka and Maharashtra, Congress leader and former Maharashtra minister Yashomati Thakur has shared a nine-month old video of union minister Nitin Gadkari saying the names of around 350,000 voters from his parliamentary constituency, Nagpur – including his relatives and hardcore supporters – had been deleted from the voters’ list during the Lok Sabha poll in June 2024.

Congress leader and former Maharashtra minister Yashomati Thakur (Anshuman Poyrekar/HT Photo)

Thakur shared the 28-second clip via a social media post on Saturday, drawing a parallel between allegations levelled by Gadkari and Gandhi and saying that “vote chori” (vote theft) happened wherever BJP did not want certain entities to get elected.

“BJP’s blind devotees who are trying to prove Congress leader Rahul Gandhi a liar should watch this video. Now, BJP’s senior leader and union minister Nitin Gadkari himself is exposing you…BJP folks, open your eyes, listen carefully,” Thakur, a former women and child development minister, said in the post, which was shared widely on Sunday.

In the 28-second clip from November 2024, Gadkari is seen telling an interviewer from an English news channel that names of 350,000 voters from Nagpur, including those who always voted for him, were deleted from the electoral list.

“I will not make allegations against anyone, but it is a fact that 350,000 voters were removed from the list…One of them was my maternal nephew. Even those from my family were removed (from the voters’ list),” Gadkari is heard saying after the interviewer asked if the names were deleted to weaken his position in Nagpur.

The fact that such allegations were levelled by two different people from two different parties, by those who held “high positions politically and socially” proved that vote theft did take place, Thakur said.

The three-term former MLA from the Teosa assembly seat in Amravati told Hindustan Times that the BJP resorted to vote theft whenever it did not want certain entities to win.

“They must have done the same thing with Gadkari ji,” she said.

Thakur also said that on average, her constituency Teosa saw an increase of about 5,000 voters every year.

“But in 2019 and 2024, large numbers of voters were deleted from the list and the population of my constituency also reduced. Do you think that is possible,” she wondered.

Thakur won the 2019 assembly poll but lost the 2024 election to the BJP’s Rajesh Wankhade by 7,617 votes.