Accusing Rahul Gandhi of “cooking up bizarre conspiracies” after losing a series of elections, BJP president J P Nadda on Saturday said instead of introspecting the election defeats, the Congress leader was busy “manufacturing fake narratives”.

Gandhi, in an article published in an English daily, claimed that the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections were a “blueprint for rigging democracy”.

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“My article shows how this happened, step by step: Step 1: Rig the panel for appointing the Election Commission. Step 2: Add fake voters to the roll. Step 3: Inflate voter turnout. Step 4: Target the bogus voting exactly where the BJP needs to win. Step 5: Hide the evidence,” the Congress leader charged.

Reacting to it, the BJP national president said that the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha was doing it in his desperation after the Congress lost a series of elections in several states.

The BJP president responded in the similar style, saying, “Here’s how he does it, step by step. Step 1: The Congress Party gets defeated in election after election due to its antics. Step 2: Instead of introspecting, he cooks up bizarre conspiracies and cries rigging. Step 3: Ignores all facts and data. Step 4: Defames institutions with zero proof”. “Step 5: Hopes for headlines over facts. Despite being exposed time and again, he shamelessly keeps peddling lies. And, he is doing this because a defeat in Bihar is certain”.

“Democracy doesn’t need drama. It needs truth,” Nadda asserted.

In the article, Gandhi also alleged that this poll “match-fixing” would next happen in the Bihar elections and “anywhere the BJP is losing”. The fixed elections are like “poison” for any democracy, and the side that cheats may win, but it damages institutions and destroys public faith in the system, he added.

“Election Commission data show that the number of registered voters in Maharashtra in the 2019 Vidhan Sabha elections was 8.98 crore, which rose five years later to 9.29 crore for the May 2024 Lok Sabha elections. But a mere five months later, by the November 2024 Vidhan Sabha elections, the number had leapt to 9.70 crore. A crawl of 31 lakh in five years, then a leap of 41 lakh in just five months,” Gandhi said.

Meanwhile, the BJP also accused Gandhi of attacking democratic institutions to undermine people’s trust in the electoral process, claiming he was doing so to pre-empt his party’s defeat in the upcoming elections.

The Congress leader was resorting to attacking democratic institutions under a well-planned conspiracy, as he knows that his party is set to suffer defeat in the upcoming Bihar assembly polls, BJP national spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari told media persons. He charged that Gandhi is trying to undermine the trust of people in the electoral process because he is unable to gain public support in favour of his party.

Bhandari also termed the LoP as “anti-democracy”.

BJP IT department head Amit Malviya too slammed the Congress leader and accused him of deliberately making repeated attempts to sow seeds of doubt and dissension in the minds of the voters about the poll process.

“It is not that Rahul Gandhi doesn’t understand how the electoral process works. He does very well. But his goal is not clarity; it is chaos. His repeated attempts to sow seeds of doubt and dissension in the minds of voters about our institutional processes are deliberate,” Malviya posted on X.