Congress announces ‘Vote Chor, Gaddhi Chhod’ rally on December 14

The Congress rally against alleged vote chori (theft), to be held in Delhi on December 14, will highlight crores of signatures that the party has collected on the issue since August, Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal said on Friday (November 21, 2025).

The rally, to be held at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, has been named the ‘Vote Chor, Gaddi Chhod’ rally, which translates to ‘Vote thief, leave the throne’.

The party had announced the rally on Tuesday after its top leadership, including Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, held a review meeting of the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in 12 States and Union Territories (UT).

“We have received crores of signatures from every corner of India, rejecting the BJP-ECI’s nefarious tactics like adding bogus voters, deleting opposition-inclined voters, and manipulating voter rolls at a mass scale,” Mr. Venugopal said in a post on X.

Mr. Venugopal alleged that the Election Commission of India (ECI), meant to be a neutral umpire, “is now a blatantly partisan player – completely destroying the very concept of a level playing field in elections”.

Congress goes solo

The Delhi rally will be an entirely Congress effort as the party wants to showcase its door-to-door signature campaign, which it started after Mr. Gandhi’s first press conference on alleged vote chori in one of the Assembly segments in Karnataka’s Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency.

Ahead of the rally, State units are handing over the signatures collected so far to the All India Congress Committee (AICC). On Thursday, former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister and AICC general secretary for Punjab, Bhupesh Baghel, handed over a document with 27 lakh signatures from Punjab to Mr. Venugopal.

However, party leaders denied that this is a sign that regional parties, which are constituents of the Opposition INDIA bloc, are seeking to distance themselves from the Congress after its debacle in the Bihar election.

“But INDIA is stronger than their noise, INDIA will win — with truth, with people, with hope,” Manickam Tagore, the Congress whip in the Lok Sabha, said in a post on X.