Congress calls BJP’s Shillong protest a desperate smokescreen to hide electoral fraud

The Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) strongly criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party’s protest outside the Congress Bhavan in Shillong, calling it a “desperate distraction” from the Modi government’s “deepening crisis of credibility.”

The BJP’s protest was anchored on the allegation that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi insulted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s late mother during the ‘Vote Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar. Rejecting the claim, the MPCC said no such remark was ever made and described the protest as “a familiar BJP tactic to weaponise grief, religion, and identity when unable to answer for unemployment, inflation, and electoral malpractice.”

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The Congress accused the BJP of evading accountability on “systematic voter roll manipulation,” citing its Karnataka findings where 1,00,250 suspicious entries were identified out of 6.5 lakh voters in the Mahadevapura constituency. The irregularities included duplicate registrations across states, fake addresses such as “House No. 0,” and dozens of voters registered at single-room dwellings or even a brewery. The MPCC warned that if such large-scale manipulation could occur in Karnataka, “it can happen anywhere, including Meghalaya.”

Calling the alleged voter fraud part of a wider “authoritarian pattern,” the Congress said the BJP has “hollowed out institutions, throttled the media, captured education, and enabled violence against minorities.” The statement accused the ruling party of bypassing Parliament, weaponising oversight agencies, and reducing democracy to “stagecraft devoid of accountability.”

“The BJP’s protest in Shillong is not a moral stand—it is a smokescreen,” the MPCC declared. “The real issue is not a manufactured insult to the Prime Minister’s family but a sustained assault on the rights of the people, the Constitution, and the democratic promise of India.”