In August 2025, former Union minister Smriti Irani made an interesting observation during a podcast. She said that the politics of Rahul Gandhi, whom she defeated from Amethi in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, has changed. The examples of the change she observed were Gandhi donning a white T-shirt, instead of the traditional kurta-pyjama, to connect with the younger generation while also repeatedly raising issues of jobs and quality of life.
Like Irani, many leaders in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party
In August 2025, former Union minister Smriti Irani made an interesting observation during a podcast. She said that the politics of Rahul Gandhi, whom she defeated from Amethi in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, has changed. The examples of the change she observed were Gandhi donning a white T-shirt, instead of the traditional kurta-pyjama, to connect with the younger generation while also repeatedly raising issues of jobs and quality of life.
Like Irani, many leaders in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) believe that Gandhi’s image has changed drastically over the years. They admit that his voice inside and outside the Parliament was being heard more and the biggest reason for this image change was his Bharat Jodo Yatra, in which he walked from Kanhakumari to Kashmir in 2022.
The Congress witnessed political dividend from the yatra in southern India in Lok Sabha polls and limited gains in the Hindi heartland, where the ruling BJP mostly stood its ground. In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party made deep inroads in the saffron party citadels. In Maharashtra, where the Congress led the opposition alliance, it performed well. In Haryana, the Congress and the BJP shared five Lok Sabha seats each, turning it into an equal battle. In Rajasthan, the Congress performed better than the BJP in the Jat dominated western region.
However, within four months of the Lok Sabha polls in 2024, the Congress lost both Maharashtra and Haryana, with the BJP claiming that it had overcome the Lok Sabha setback. The Congress was not convinced, claiming anti-BJP sentiments on the ground in these states and several polls favouring Congress at the hustings.
It was after the defeat in the Maharashtra polls that the Congress first levelled the allegations of electoral roll manipulation, saying close to four million new votes were added to the rolls after the Lok Sabha polls. Although the Election Commission of India (ECI) refuted the charge, saying the increase was not unusual and the Congress never objected to the jump when rolls were revised, the Congress stood its ground showing several “bogus” entries in the electoral rolls.
Subsequent allegations showed a “substantial” increase in voter numbers in several assembly constituencies including that of chief minister Devendra Fadavanis. An increase of more than four percent in the number of voters at a polling booth is described as ‘substantial’ by the election commission, and it needs to be verified by local booth level officers. However, this was not done in several assembly seats in Maharashtra.
Gandhi claimed that he will soon come out with his own investigation on the Maharashtra electoral roll “manipulation” after claiming that bogus voters were added in Mahadevapura assembly constituency in the Bengaluru Central in Karnataka, which the BJP won in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
As the electoral roll fraud allegations being made by the Opposition appeared to be losing steam, the unprecedented decision by the Election Commission in June to conduct a Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bihar, just four months before the scheduled assembly polls, fuelled the electoral roll manipulation allegations. It also provided Rahul Gandhi an opportunity to accuse the ECI of trying to help the BJP by preparing fresh electoral rolls, which would result in disenfranchising millions of marginalised voters.
The reasons given by ECI to conduct the exercise at the short notice was “rapid urbanisation, frequent migration, inclusion of youth voters in the rolls and removing illegal immigrants”. The question remained as to why this was not done during the summary revision of rolls conducted in January 2025 or before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Another misstep of the ECI is to not include voter identity cards and biometric-based Aadhaar identity cards as documents to get one’s name in the SIR. The two documents have maximum penetration, with Aadhaar covering close to 99% of the population.
The ECI has prescribed 11 sets of documents to prove one’s date and place of birth in Bihar where less than 20% of the population have birth certificates. Many believe that the SIR is akin to conducting the National Register of Citizens (NCR) in an arbitrary and non-inclusive manner. ECI has no statutory role in deciding citizenship under the law. The SIR burdens the voter with the proof of citizenship which goes against the principle of universal franchise. Rather the onus of proving that a person is not eligible to vote lies with the ECI through an inquiry, not the resident.
Most experts believe that the SIR is not a fair process considering that the 2020 Bihar assembly elections witnessed a victory margin of less than 3,500 votes in 35 assembly seats. In many of these seats, the victory margin was in two-or-three-digit figures. The vote share difference between the ruling National Democratic Alliance and Rashtriya Janata Dal-led Grand Alliance was just 0.5 percentage point making it one of the closest elections in the state ever and in such a scenario any tampering with the electoral roll can lead to questionable election outcomes.
The ECI on July 31 said that 6.5 million names have been removed from the total 70.9 million voters in January 2025 electoral rolls as they were either of dead people, those who have migrated or duplicates. Media reports after that have, however, claimed that many of the living people were removed as dead and several other names were removed arbitrarily. The election commission in its official press statements said that those who have been left out can always get their names enrolled after submitting documents and filling the form. However, a question arises here — if the house-to-house survey was done for the SIR, how were so many people left out, especially from the deprived, most marginalised and weaker sections of the society?
These sections may have found their way into Rahul Gandhi’s rhetoric, who during his 16-day ‘Voter Adhikar Vatra’ covering 110 of the total 243 assembly constituencies of Bihar, promised that he will not allow their voting right to be snatched. If the EC’s final electoral roll to be published by the end of September includes 99% of the Bihar population, a large number of them would credit Gandhi for it as he kept the issue boiling through his yatra.
The yatra has attracted large crowds in many parts of the state but political analysts claim getting people in densely populated Bihar is not surprising. The crowd is also not a barometer of the political swell as leaders have attracted huge crowds in their rallies but have lost polls. Gandhi’s ‘Vote Chor Gaddi Chhod’ slogan has found resonance with people.
During the yatra, internal Congress surveys showed that Gandhi has found good resonance with younger voters and women, who in Bihar are considered chief minister Nitish Kumar’s crucial vote bank. The SIR has come as a political boon for the opposition in Bihar led by Rahul Gandhi with chief minister Nitish Kumar facing major anti-incumbency of 20 years in power, even though his government is offering doles of pre-poll sops to attract voters. The SIR issue has also united the opposition grand alliance like never before under the “undisputed” leadership of RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav.
The Yatra ended on Monday with a rally at historic Gandhi Maidan in Patna. The Bihar elections are mostly likely to take place in phases after mid-October and in the first week of November. In highly complex Indian politics, there is a saying ‘a few days are enough to change the turbulent tide.’ It could be apt in Bihar’s electoral context.
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