Congress on decline for decades, Rahul's 'vote chori' charge bereft of basis: BJP

Business To Business, New Delhi, 12 September 2025: On Friday, the Bharatiya Janata Party invoked historical electoral data to assert that Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of “vote chori” lack any substantive foundation. The BJP contended that the Congress’s electoral prospects have been in a steady decline since 1984, the year it secured its last majority victory in the Lok Sabha, reaching its nadir in 2014 when the party was still in power.
 
G V L Narasimha Rao, a former Member of Parliament and seasoned election analyst representing the BJP, issued a statement suggesting that the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha implies that the decline of the Congress commenced only after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent to power in 2014, and that this decline is attributable to a purported collusion between the Election Commission and the central government.
 
He clarified, “The reality is that the Congress has been on a downward trajectory since its peak in 1984, when Rajiv Gandhi secured a landslide victory with over 48 percent of the vote share and 414 out of 543 seats. Following a gradual erosion of popular support over the subsequent three decades, its poorest performance was recorded in 2014, when it managed to win merely 44 seats out of 543, with a vote share of 19.5 percent,” he remarked.