Overview
- During visits to Rae Bareli and Gujarat, Rahul Gandhi repeated allegations that governments were formed through 'vote chori' and promised to soon release more "dynamic, explosive" evidence, using a "hydrogen bomb" metaphor.
- He said 'vote theft' is the country's main issue and downplayed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's scheduled trip to Manipur, calling it "not a big deal" compared with his fraud claims.
- BJP spokespeople, including Shehzad Poonawalla and Pradeep Bhandari, asserted that metadata from the Congress PDFs uploaded on August 7 shows a Myanmar time zone, alleging the presentation was created abroad; the Congress dismissed the charge as ridiculous.
- Senior BJP leader GVL Narasimha Rao rejected the accusations as false and reframed Congress losses as part of a decades-long decline across states, arguing that the party is wrongly blaming the Modi government.
- In a separate attack, BRS leader K. T. Rama Rao accused the Congress of 'MLA chori' in Telangana over defections of his party's legislators and pressed Rahul Gandhi to address what he called double standards.