Rahul Gandhi accuses election chief over alleged BJP pitch

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of helping the Bharatiya Janata Party recruit candidates while he was a serving civil servant, then putting him in charge of overseeing elections. Gandhi made the allegation on September 26, citing former Kerala chief secretary Jiji Thomson’s account of a conversation in 2016. Kumar and the BJP did not immediately respond in the reports provided. Thomson told a Malayalam news channel that, during a flight to Delhi, Kumar asked about his plans after retirement and suggested he contest in 2019 as a BJP candidate, then become a member of Parliament and a minister. Thomson said he declined, explaining that he was not interested in electoral politics. The account is attributed to Thomson’s interview; the material available does not independently corroborate the conversation. Gandhi wrote on X that Kumar, then an IAS officer, had been used to recruit for the BJP, and alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah later made him the “umpire” overseeing what Gandhi called the “match-fixing” of elections. Those characterizations were Gandhi’s allegations, not established findings.