Mounting a sharp attack on the Congress over the special intensive revision of electoral rolls during a Lok Sabha discussion on electoral reforms where he had an exchange with Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah Wednesday accused the Nehru-Gandhi family of “vote chori” since Independence. He said the reason for the Congress loss of power was its leadership and not EVMs, and “one day Congress workers themselves will ask you questions”.Shah said the SIR was aimed at cleaning electoral rolls and ensuring that “infiltrators” are detected, deleted from voter lists, and deported.Responding to Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori” allegations, he recalled that before Jawaharlal Nehru became Prime Minister, the votes from the states favoured Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as the president of Congress. Yet, Nehru, he said, rose to the top through “vote chori”, eventually becoming the PM.And referring to the Allahabad High Court ruling that Indira Gandhi’s 1971 victory over Raj Narain in Rae Bareli was secured through unfair means, Shah said this was another instance of “vote chori”.“To cover it, a law was brought that there can be no case against the PM. You are asking about immunity to the EC, but what about the immunity Mrs Gandhi gave to herself?” he asked.He said there was a case pending against Sonia Gandhi in a Delhi court that she became a voter before becoming a citizen. He said it was for the court to decide and he was just stating facts.Shah said if the Opposition opposed the SIR exercise, it would lose even West Bengal and Tamil Nadu just like it lost Bihar. Countering the Opposition remark that the EC was not the authority to decide who was a citizen, he said the EC was charged with the conduct of elections, whose eligibility conditions were decided by Articles 326 and 327 of the Constitution.Story continues below this ad“Article 326 is important for SIR, as it decides who are eligible voters. The voter must be a citizen of India. They ask why EC is doing it? Because it is its responsibility… In Article 327, voter lists are discussed,” he said.Shah recalled that SIRs were held without objection in 1952, 1957 and 1961 when Nehru was PM; in 1965-66 when Lal Bahadur Shastri was PM; in 1983-84 when Indira Gandhi was PM; in 1987-89 when Rajiv Gandhi was PM; in 1993-95 when Narasimha Rao was PM, and between 2002 and 2004, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee and then Manmohan Singh were PM.“Until 2004, no party opposed it, as it is for keeping polls clean and democracy healthy. Periodic revisions are necessary, so the EC decided on it,” he said. “In 2010, an Election Commissioner decided that a returning officer cannot delete names. After that, if someone died, migrated, or an officer was transferred, the name was not deleted. At that time the Congress was in power. So, the above kinds of names should be deleted, and foreign nationals’ names should be identified and deleted. Will infiltrators decide who will be PM or CM?”He referred to the 1995 Lal Babu Hussein case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the returning officer can investigate whether a person is an Indian citizen or not.Story continues below this adTaking a swipe at Rahul Gandhi over his press conferences alleging “vote chori”, Shah said that a Haryana house which the Congress leader claimed had 501 voters was actually a one-acre plot where multiple families over 2-3 generations were living, and the address was the same when the Congress last won Haryana.He said the voters that Gandhi had claimed had been deprived of voting rights or had their age wrongly displayed had already clarified that there was no wrongdoing.He said the SIR was necessary to clean up voter lists because non-deletion since 2010 had led to anomalies of one voter with multiple votes. He gave the examples of Pawan Khera of the Congress and Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD.“We won 44 elections since 2014, and they also won 30 elections in all. If the voter list is corrupt, why did you take the oath?” Shah sought to know.Story continues below this adGandhi asked him why he had not responded to the question on why legal immunity was given to the EC. Shah said the provision was the same in the Representation of the People Act, 1951.“In RPA Act, 1951 itself, under clause 32, the ECI has immunity. We just repeated it. The RPA Act itself says no lawsuit can be filed against ECI officials for discharging their electoral duties,” he said.On why the CJI was not included in the panel to choose the CEC, thereby rendering the LoP in a minority, he said, “In 2023… the Supreme Court suggested that if the government is ready, a committee under CJI should be formed, with PM and LoP as members, to choose the CEC. In 2023, a law was made, with the PM, a minister chosen by him, and the LoP as members of the panel.” He said the Prime Minister directly appointed the EC for decades under the Congress, and that Navin Chawla was appointed despite objections regarding his past during the Emergency.“You say you have 33% weightage. But you gave the Opposition no weightage at all. If you can win elections, you will be on the side of 66% weightage,” he said.Story continues below this adRegarding objections on EVMs, Shah said Rajiv Gandhi had first introduced them, and the Supreme Court had upheld them. He underlined that they were first used throughout India in 2004, after which the Congress won two Lok Sabha elections in a row. But, he said, they began to complain after 2014, when the BJP started winning, and chose not to accept the EC’s challenge to hack an EVM in 2017.He referred to the VVPATs, saying that the EC decided that 5% results of EVM and VVPATs would be compared. “In a sample of 16000, not a single vote has been found invalid. And their polling agents are there and also sign,” he said. “In their times, ballot boxes were stolen. The EVM stopped it. They used to win because of the theft of ballot boxes. Now they are exposed.”To Gandhi’s question on why a rule was made to delete CCTV footage 45 days after election results, Shah said that since 1991, candidates were allowed to file an election petition within 45 days.“There was no CCTV footage then; it was later added by the ECI. All that the ECI has done is to align it with the rule. The ECI had said that CCTV footage is an internal arrangement and not a constitutional provision. The rule says that any person can move Supreme Court to access CCTV footage within 45 days, and the court can order that the footage not be destroyed. Even a political agent can get it from the High Court. If people start randomly asking for footage in lakhs of booths, how will ECI function?”Story continues below this adAs the Opposition walked out before he completed his speech, Shah said, “They did not run away when Nehru, Indira were criticised by me, but ran away when I spoke about infiltrators. The country has been partitioned once, we don’t want another Partition.”