It was a unique disruption. For a nation whose birth witnessed the displacement of 10-12 million on religious lines and the broad-day murder of 1- 2 million, political disruption usually means slaughtering a couple of thousand. But here was an ostracised man, after enduring an 11-year-long defamation campaign, claiming to set off a nuclear bomb in Indian politics with just one presentation.

When Rahul Gandhi began, the tech support's ineptness was palpable. But he kept going. First, he explained the methodology and selection process for his research. Then came the information. The opposition leader in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) told the audience that of the 543 constituencies, his team had chosen one in Karnataka for the audit. This Bangalore Central constituency includes seven Vidhan Sabha (provincial legislative assembly) segments. Out of these seven, six voted for Congress, but in one (Mahadevapura), the BJP outperformed Congress by a whopping 114,000 votes, changing the outcome of the Lok Sabha seat in favour of Modi's party.

He then described the obfuscation tactics of the Indian Election Commission (ECI), which refused to hand over digital or machine-readable voter list data. The seven-foot-tall pile of paper that was given made it impossible to use optical character recognition, so it had to be done manually. It took forty of his team members six months to sift through all that data. But the results were stunning.

In one Vidhan Sabha constituency, they found over a hundred thousand irregularities. Of these, 11,965 were duplicate voters, 40,009 had fake or invalid addresses, 10,452 were bulk voters with a single address, 4,132 had fake photos, and 33,692 had abuse of the first-time voter........

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