PoliticsBJP vs Congress
Smriti Irani calls Rahul Gandhi a 'prince in perpetual waiting', says Congress lost 56 polls before SIR
In Kolkata on Tuesday, the BJP general secretary said the Congress blames the Election Commission instead of its own leadership, and defended the deletion of about 13 crore names from the draft rolls.
Key points
- Smriti Irani called Rahul Gandhi a 'prince in perpetual waiting' who will not accept defeat.
- She said the Congress lost 56 Assembly elections between 2014 and 2025, before the SIR began.
- She put the names left off the draft rolls at about 13 crore, most of them dead, duplicate or shifted voters.
The BJP turned its fire on Rahul Gandhi from Kolkata on Tuesday evening, with national general secretary Smriti Irani calling the Leader of the Opposition “a prince in perpetual waiting” who cannot accept that he has lost.
“The prince in perpetual waiting is unwilling to accept defeats,” the former Union minister told a press conference. She said Gandhi was questioning the legitimacy of elections and of constitutional institutions because the results had gone against him.
‘Look at your own leadership’
Irani said the Congress had lost 56 Assembly elections between 2014 and 2025, long before the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls began. The party, she argued, was blaming the Election Commission instead of asking hard questions of its own leadership.
She defended the revision itself. By her count, about 13 crore names were left off the draft rolls: roughly 3 crore of dead voters, 1 crore duplicates, about 3 crore people not found at their addresses and nearly 6 crore who had moved. Verification, she said, was 90% complete for about 90 crore voters. She asked why the Congress, and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, objected to removing duplicate and ineligible names, and accused the TMC of shielding “infiltrators”.
Protests and London
Irani said more than 118 police personnel had been injured during opposition protests, and that nearly 20 lakh booth-level agents from opposition parties had taken part in the exercise. She also accused Gandhi of speaking against India abroad. “Rahul Gandhi goes to London and says he wants to defeat Modi,” she said.
The attack comes two days after the INDIA bloc’s rally at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi, where Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge accused the Commission of helping the BJP.