New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday escalated his attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Election Commission, alleging widespread electoral fraud in the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections. Gandhi claimed that as many as 25 lakh fake votes were cast, accusing the BJP of turning a “Congress victory into defeat” through manipulation of voter data.
Addressing a press conference in the national capital, Gandhi alleged that his team had uncovered “100 percent proof” of a large-scale scam within the voter rolls. “Haryana has 2 crore voters, and 25 lakh of them are fake,” he declared, suggesting that one in every eight voters was fictitious.
Gandhi also claimed that over 5.21 lakh duplicate voter entries had been identified, some allegedly featuring the same photograph used multiple times under different names. During the presentation, he showcased an example of a woman’s image appearing repeatedly in voter lists under names like Seema, Sweety, and Saraswati, purportedly casting votes 22 times.
However, a subsequent verification revealed that the image displayed by Gandhi was actually of a Brazilian model, whose photograph was publicly available on Unsplash.com — a free stock image platform. The image, titled “woman wearing blue denim jacket,” was uploaded in 2017 by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero. According to the site, the picture has been viewed over 59 million times and downloaded more than 4 lakh times under a free-use license.
Ferrero’s profile confirms he is a professional photographer, and there is no evidence linking either him or the model to the alleged voter fraud.
