With the state of Bihar approaching the key elections, political hostilities between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress had been on the rise with the recent press conference by Rahul Gandhi, the Congress leader where he claimed that the state had had large-scale vote theft in Haryana. Gandhi who is the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha asserted that the 2024 Haryana Assembly elections were full of duplicate, fake, and bulk voting and that the Election Commission of India (ECI) was under duress by the ruling BJP.
Gandhi showed so-called evidence in what he called the H-Files, which included a photograph of a woman whom he argued was a Brazilian model whose image appeared 22 times in the Haryana voter list under different names including Seema and Sweety. He said that these discrepancies were evidence of systematic electoral malpractice.
The BJP immediately rejected the allegations of Gandhi terming his press conference as a laughable one, he was accused of trying to take the minds of the people off the real issues of national and state concerns. Party leaders opined that Gandhi had made some politically instigated allegations, which were aimed at tainting the Bihar polls.
BJP leader of Delhi CM Gupta condemned the remarks made by Gandhi by opining that, to the person who claims to be a nayak (hero), I wish to remind him that the jan-nayaka (hero of the people) of Bihar will be. Thieves of the state funds are khalnayaks (villains) who will go to jail, and the nalayak (incompetent) attempting to fool the people will go to spend their vacation in a foreign country.
These comments were reminiscent of those made by the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju whose earlier comment made accusations of the congress leader as mere empty theatrics. The encounter highlights the intensifying political tension with each of the sides becoming increasingly critical of each other in the build up to the Bihar elections with the congress still pushing on its accusation of election rigging and the BJP scoffing at the credibility and intentions of Gandhi.