The ‘something else’, Gandhi has alleged before — with allies taking up the refrain in force — is ‘vote chori‘. However, the youth of Bihar will not stand for it, he said, addressing the crowds in Saidpur.

“In today’s India, the poor have only their vote left. If your vote is taken away, your ration card, land and everything else will also be taken away,” the Congress leader said.

He isn’t reaching. This was the exact apprehension put forth by Mintu Paswan, one of the supposed ‘dead’ voters eliminated from the rolls by the ECI who turned up in person before the Supreme Court to plead his case. Paswan was worried he and his brother, also disenfranchised, stood to lose access to welfare schemes, having been declared ‘dead’. (Read National Herald‘s exclusive interview with Paswan and three others in similar straits here.)

‘Vote chori’, Gandhi lamented, was an attack on Bharat Mata [Mother India] herself, as he brought forward Subodh Kumar — yet another newly disenfranchised person who still has his voter ID card — to address the crowd. There are, he said, lakhs like him.