A sharp political face-off erupted in the national capital on Friday, September 25, 2026, after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) launched a stinging counteroffensive against Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi over his allegations accusing the ruling dispensation of colluding with the Election Commission of India (ECI). Addressing a press conference in New Delhi amid the unfolding debate over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, Gandhi had questioned why anti-incumbency impacts opposition-led state regimes while supposedly sparing the Narendra Modi-led government, implying institutional bias within the poll watchdog. Pushing back strongly, BJP National Spokesperson and Rajya Sabha MP Sudhanshu Trivedi dismissed Gandhi’s claims, asserting that the Congress leader’s political grasp and electoral knowledge stand at “absolute zero,” while presenting historical election data to show that India’s most persistent and enduring anti-incumbency wave has targeted the Congress party for over half a century.
Decades in the Political Wilderness: BJP Highlights Congress’s Exile Across Major States
Trivedi dismantled the premise of Gandhi’s accusations by pointing to the historical timeline of assembly election verdicts archived across official Election Commission data banks. Emphasizing that Congress’s rejection by Indian voters predates the modern political rise of the BJP, Trivedi highlighted Tamil Nadu, where the Grand Old Party was routed in 1967 and has failed to form a government on its own for nearly sixty years. The BJP spokesperson extended this historical audit to eastern and northern strongholds, noting that voters threw the Congress out of power in West Bengal in 1977, in Uttar Pradesh in 1989, in Bihar in 1990, and in Odisha in 1999—decades-long exiles during which the electorate consistently refused to bring the party back to power across diverse demographic belts.
“CCTV and Free Media Ended Their Run”: Trivedi Links Congress Decline to Transparent Elections
Turning his critique toward institutional integrity, the BJP spokesperson argued that Congress’s electoral grievances began mounting precisely as India’s democratic machinery evolved into a foolproof, digitally audited ecosystem. “Ever since transparent elections took root, CCTV surveillance was installed at polling booths, webcasting began, and an alert independent media ecosystem emerged, it became impossible for Congress to manipulate ground realities or secure power through muscle and malpractice,” Trivedi said. Concluding his counter-attack, Trivedi remarked that rather than blaming constitutional watchdogs, EVMs, or voter list revisions whenever confronted with an electoral loss, the Congress leadership should introspect why citizens across India’s largest states have maintained a generational anti-incumbency stance against their party for over five decades.