'Hum nahin sudhrenge': Bihar BJP MP's Sholay jab at Rahul Gandhi, ‘first vote chori in Patel vs Nehru 1947'

Sanjay Jaiswal said Rahul Gandhi missed a trick by not focusing on the performance of Nitish Kumar's NDA regime in Bihar, instead sticking to SIR as an issue

With a movie dialogue, plus a list of thank-yous and suggestions, Bihar BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal focused squarely on Leader of Opposition and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi in his speech in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.

BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal speaking in the Lok Sabha during a debate on electoral reforms on Tuesday, December 9. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was not present in the House but remained the centre of Jaiswal's arguments. (Photos: Sansad TV/ANI)

During the debate on electoral reforms, Jaiswal thanked Rahul Gandhi, who was not present at the time, for raising the issue of “vote chori (theft)” in Bihar. He said this actually helped the ruling BJP-led NDA in winning the election.

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He suggested that Rahul Gandhi missed a trick by not focusing on the performance of Nitish Kumar's JDU-BJP (NDA) regime.

“There could have been many things to point out in a 20-year tenure," Jaiswal acknowledged, “But he kept saying ‘SIR’, 'SIR', ‘vote chori’… which confused the people of Bihar. They wondered whose vote was ‘stolen’. Most of them filled the SIR forms, and could not understand what he was saying." SIR refers to Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls.

Rahul's foreign trips and Asrani's dialogue

Opposition leaders should learn from the BJP and NDA how to fight elections with commitment, Jaiswal suggested. He then taunted Rahul Gandhi over his foreign trips too.

Amit Shah, BJP's chief strategist and the home minister, never goes abroad because he focuses on home turf, Jaiswal argued, “And we have a PM who has not take a day off in years."

“You (Rahul) went on a 20-day tourist trip of Bihar,” he said, referring to Rahul Gandhi and RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav's Voter Adhikar Yatra, “but when the election came you went for a trip abroad.”

He then turned to Bollywood, and to one of the biggest Hindi films of all time. “The Opposition refuses to let go of the issue (of SIR) even after such a massive defeat in Bihar. This reminds me of a dialogue from Sholay (1975), spoken by (actor) Asrani (who played a jailor): ‘Humein sudhaarne wale bade-bade sudhar gaye, lekin hum nahin sudhre’ (Those who wanted to set us right have set themselves right, but we remain as we were).” The lines were not exact, but smirks and laughter they got.

Nehru as PM after 1947 ‘instance of vote chori’

Further on vote-theft allegations, Jaiswal went back to the 1947 instance of the then Congress leadership choosing Jawaharlal Nehru over Vallabhbhai Patel for the first PM of independent India. He called it the “first and biggest instance of vote chori” in India.

He then listed the 1975-77 Emergency imposed by the then PM Indira Gandhi as another such instance.

Jaiswal also recalled cases of “booth capturing” when elections were held with paper ballots in the mid-1990s.

The Congress and Samajwadi Party have demanded a reversion to paper ballots from electronic voting machines, alleging “possibility of tampering”.

'Keep at it in Bengal too'

The senior BJP leader added another suggestion: that the Opposition parties should continue to raise this issue in the West Bengal election of March-April 2026.

“We will, too, raise the issue of removing infiltrators from voter lists. Bangladeshis and Rohingyas have been illegally added earlier in these lists," he said. "But we will also talk about the failures of the Trinamool government of Mamata Banerjee,” the Paschim Champaran MP said.

The SIR is currently on in West Bengal among 12 states and UTs after Bihar. The ruling Trinamool Congress, which has kept BJP at bay, is not entirely friendly with Rahul's party but has been opposing the SIR.

Jaiswal insisted that the SIR was “only to clean up the voter rolls, which is the bedrock of free and fair elections as envisaged by our Constitution's maker Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar”.

Why Bengal became key point in debates

In West Bengal, the Congress has been a small player for decades, while the BJP has improved its tally but struggled to unseat Mamata Banerjee, who came to power in 2011 after defeating an entrenched Communist regime.

Bengal is a focus of the BJP in this winter session of Parliament too. The national song Vande Mataram, on which a debate was held, was written by Bengali poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. And Rahul's sister, Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, pointedly accused PM Narendra Modi of eyeing the Bengal election by holding a “debate” on Vande Mataram.

Priyanka's Bengal-related jibe at the PM led to a heated argument between home minister Amit Shah and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge in the Rajya Sabha.

Back in the Lok Sabha, Jaiswal repeated the slogan “Bihar toh hamara ho gaya, ab Bengal ki baari hai” ('We have won Bihar, it's now time for Bengal'). That's the slogan raised on Monday by NDA members when PM Modi entered the Lok Sabha for a discussion on Vande Mataram.