In October 2020, when the BJP was in power in Karnataka, the Bengaluru Police carried out a crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the city, arresting 58 people. The two areas the police focused on were Marathahalli and Ramamurthy Nagar on the eastern fringes of the city.
Marathalli comes under the Mahadevpura Assembly constituency that is at the centre of Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s allegation of “vote theft” levelled against the Election Commission (EC). This, he alleged, benefitted the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections last year as it illegally secured 1,00,250 votes in Mahadevapura, a constituency with around 3.25 lakh voters. This pushed it to victory in the Bangalore Central parliamentary constituency, he claimed. On Friday, the Congress is set to hold a protest in Bengaluru.
Viewed using the numbers the Congress leader shared — 11,965 fake voters, 40,009 voters with fake addresses, 10,452 voters in a few addresses etc — the allegations of the BJP getting over one lakh votes illegally are alarming. However, looking at the constituency broadly through the lens of its floating migrant population — spread over newly sprouted slums and high-rises — and its political history of BJP victories, the voter manipulation allegation is likely not as big an issue as Gandhi is making it out to be.
The Mahadevapura Assembly seat did not exist till 2008 and was carved out of the erstwhile Varthur constituency along with K R Pura. Even before it came into existence as an Assembly constituency, Mahadevapura was a hotbed of unregulated real estate development through the conversion of agricultural land into prime real estate that had become increasingly unavailable in the heart of Bengaluru following the tech boom in the early 2000s.
For new migrants, the Mahadevapura and K R Pura region (which has the highest population for Assembly constituencies in Bengaluru at over 3.25 lakh each) has provided affordable housing and living needs in the last two decades.
Reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Mahadevapura has been won by the BJP leader Aravind Limbavali on three occasions (2008, 2013, 2018) and by his wife Manjula S in 2023. Limbavali is now in a rebel group in the state BJP, locked in an internecine battle for control of the party against state unit president B Y Vijayendra. Initially, he won the seat by narrow margins, but has widened the gap over his rivals since the rise of the party nationally under PM Narendra Modi. In 2008, Limbavali won by 13,358 votes, in 2013 by 6,149 votes, and in 2018 by 17,784 votes, while his wife Manjula won two years ago by 44,501 votes.
Despite strong undercurrents of anti-incumbency — land grabbing of its dozens of lakes, frequent flooding, and traffic congestion are features of this underdeveloped constituency — Limbavali has remained in control with his grassroots politics and money power. In the period Mahadevapura was created, the Bangalore Central parliamentary seat also came into being following delimitation. The BJP’s P C Mohan has won it in all four Lok Sabha contests since then (2009, 2014, 2019 and 2024).
The BJP’s victory margin in the Lok Sabha polls last year was the lowest since 2009 at 32,707 votes. In 2009, Mohan won the seat by 35,218 votes, in 2014 by 1.37 lakh votes, and in 2019 by 70,968 votes. In all these victories, the main contributors were the votes the party polled in Mahadevapura and K R Pura.
One of the problems the Congress has faced in Mahadevapura is finding a long-term candidate to challenge Limbavalli. The party has invariably parachuted candidates into the constituency at the eleventh hour, leaving the party with a weak base.
A 2022 controversy
Limbavalli and former K R Pura MLA Nandish Reddy have utilised the services of private agencies to bring the floating migrant population into the BJP fold over the years.
According to Congress sources, the voter lists in Mahadevapura were selected to analyse voter fraud patterns due to a controversy that occurred in 2022 over an exercise to gather voter data in the constituency. “It is the Chilume incident from 2022 that has resulted in the current charge,” said a Congress leader.
Back then, the BJP was in power and a controversy broke out over the city municipal corporation, BBMP, assigning a private firm called the “Chilume Group” the contract to gather voter data in Mahadevapura and two other seats. At the time, the Congress’s state in-charge, Randeep Singh Surjewala, alleged efforts were afoot to rig voter lists.
The accusations emerged in September 2022 after a local NGO raised concerns about the “Chilume Group” enlisting private workers and passing them off as civic officials to carry out the EC’s Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) programme, registration of voters, and linking of voter IDs to Aadhaar numbers through the poll panel’s Garuda app.
The Congress alleged that the group was linked to BJP leaders from Bengaluru — then BJP minister C N Ashwathnarayan denied the allegation — and that the firm was awarded the contract as part of an exercise to manipulate voter lists through deletions and additions that favoured the BJP.
“The sum and substance of this conspiracy is to deny the ordinary voter his right to vote and to tamper with the electoral list by surreptitious means,” the Congress said back then. The BJP government ordered an investigation that led to the arrest of 10 people, including Chilume Enterprises’ director Ravikumar Krishnappa and three others from the firm, and four BBMP revenue officers who were accused of facilitating the alleged fraud. All of them were later set free.
What EC-ordered inquiry found
The EC directed the then Regional Commissioner for Bengaluru, Amlan Aditya Biswas, to conduct an administrative inquiry into the case. In his report, the IAS officer said “no electoral fraud or manipulation of electoral roll” was detected in Shivajinagar, Chickpet, and Mahadevapura and there was “no evidence of any intrusion into or tampering of data” on ERO NET, which the EC had developed to manage electoral rolls, or the Garuda App.
However, the report concluded that the BBMP allowed the Chilume Group to “illegally collect voter data on an unauthorised private Digital Application (Digital Sameeksha) and storage of the same in a foreign server, thereby creating wilfully opportunities for wrongful gain from personal data”.
It was also found that Nandish Reddy had used the services of the private group in 2018 to collect the details of voters in his constituency.
“Constituencies on the borders of Bengaluru like KR Pura and Mahadevapura have large numbers of migrant workers and political leaders would like to ensure that there are no duplicate votes by conducting surveys to match voter lists,” Reddy said in his defence.
Reddy, who lost the 2013 and 2018 elections from K R Pura to his then Congress rival Byrathi Basavaraj (now with the BJP), said he was concerned that his opponent might have been manipulating the voter list.