Why Rajura’s voter count jumped by 55,000

Leader of Opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi on Thursday alleged voter list irregularities in two more constituencies: Aland in Karnataka and Rajura in Maharashtra. Gandhi alleged that while voter deletions were carried out in Aland using an automated software, 6,850 “fake online additions” were made in Rajaura in Chandrapur district.
Rajura is one of the six Assembly segments in the Chandrapur Lok Sabha constituency in the Vidarbha region, which has been held either by the BJP or the Congress since 1996. In last year’s Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, the contest between the BJP and the Congress in Rajura was a close one.
In the parliamentary polls, in which the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance suffered a setback across the state, he party lost Chandrapur by a massive 2.6 lakh votes. In Rajura, the Congress candidate Pratibha Dhanorkar had a lead of 58,349 votes over former minister Sudhir Mungantiwar of the BJP. The Congress ended up winning all six Assembly segments.
However, the tables turned a few months later in the Assembly polls when Vithoba Bhongle of the BJP edged out Congress’s Subhash Dhote, a former MLA, by 3,054 votes. “We have reasons to believe the Assembly elections in Maharashtra were not free and fair. After a major drubbing in the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP-RSS resorted to vote manipulation to win the polls,” alleged state Congress president Harshwardhan Vasantrao Sapkal.
“The vote count in the Rajura constituency between the Lok Sabha and Assembly increased by 55,000 within a span of six months. Between October 1 and October 15, 2024, as many as 11,667 bogus voters were registered online. Our candidate Subhash Dhote lodged a formal complaint and 6,853 of these entries were deleted, and an FIR was filed. Unfortunately, no action followed. The party has been raising its voice to protest foul play in polls. It has demanded that the IP addresses, email IDs, and mobile numbers used for these fake registrations be revealed. To date, this information has not been provided,” said state Congress spokesperson Atul Londhe.
Dhote claimed that the “benami names” listed had addresses in Telangana and Uttar Pradesh. “We bought to EC notice the steep rise in voter enrollment daily, 6,853 were deleted,” he said.

History of the constituency

The Rajura Assembly seat was established in 1962. In the 13 elections held since then, the Congress has won it seven times.
The Congress’s Vithalrao Dhote won it in 1962 but, five years later, the seat went to Independent candidate S B Jiwtode Guruji. Vithalrao regained it five years later, while in 1978 the winner was Janata Party’s Baburao Musle. In 1980 and 1985, the Congress’s Prabhakar Mamulkar won the seat.
In 1990 and 1995, Rajura went to the Janata Party’s Wamanrao Chatap before the Congress’s Sudarshan Nimkar regained it in 1999. In 2004, Chatap won it again and in 2009, Dhote won the seat for the first time. The BJP’s Sanjay Dhote made a breakthrough in the constituency in 2014, riding on the Narendra Modi wave, and wrested the constituency. While Dhote regained the seat in 2019, he fell short last year.