If our Constitution has been destroyed, our laws are illegal. If our laws are illegal, our institutions are meaningless," he said.

He said the alleged issue was therefore not limited to electoral rolls but concerned the wider constitutional framework." The central question here is this is not just an attack on the vote; this is an attack on the idea, the basic infrastructure, and the expression of every single Indian person," Rahul said.

What triggered the latest row? The immediate trigger was an Indian Express investigation reporting that Sandhu and Joshi recorded at least 14 objections over 10 months to decisions and orders issued in the name of the Election Commission.

The objections reportedly covered voter registration and deletion, changes to Form 6 used for new voter registration, access to and centralisation of electoral-roll databases, and other aspects of the SIR exercise. The report said the two commissioners had objected four times on a single day and had raised concerns about decisions they said were taken without their knowledge or approval.

The Election Commission, however, has disputed the interpretation that the reported internal notes amounted to a breakdown or disagreement over final decisions. The poll panel said internal technical notes, queries and suggestions were part of the normal administrative and decision-making process and maintained that the final decisions of the Commission were unanimous.

Its response did not dispute the existence of the notes but said focusing on individual objections presented only part of the overall decision-making process. The EC's position is that all decisions relating to SIR had the approval of CEC Gyanesh Kumar and election commissioners Sandhu and Joshi.

In a post on X, Bhandari accused Rahul of making false claims and said the Congress leader was unable to win public support through democratic means. He also challenged Rahul's assertion that there had been no anti-incumbency against the BJP since 2014, saying the BJP had lost 20 elections since then.

BJP leader and MP Sudhanshu Trivedi also challenged Rae Bareli MP's argument on anti-incumbency. He pointed to the Congress's electoral record in states including Tamil Nadu and West Bengal and argued that anti-incumbency had affected the Congress as well.

On the media report, Trivedi questioned the basis for treating the reported objections as evidence that the Election Commission's final decisions were not unanimous." Do you have even a single report indicating that a decision was not unanimous?"

Trivedi said, adding that there was no quoted statement from any Election Commissioner saying that a final decision had not been unanimous. He also questioned whether the reported internal objections should be treated as evidence of a wider institutional dispute when the Commission had maintained that its decisions were unanimous.

He cited electoral swings in Haryana, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, and said governments and political parties in India had historically faced anti-incumbency." Haryana swings from one party to another for 50 years.

Suddenly anti-incumbency disappears. Maharashtra swings; suddenly it disappears.

Uttar Pradesh swings. Sometimes Samajwadi, sometimes BSP; it disappears.

Madhya Pradesh, it disappears. Gujarat, it disappears," Rahul said.

He cited former prime minister Indira Gandhi's experience after the 1971 Bangladesh war as an example of how anti-incumbency, according to him, had affected even highly popular leaders." It happens to leader after leader.

It does not happen to PM Modi, Shah and the BJP - now we know the answer to it," he said. He also played videos of PM Modi and Shah, including remarks about the BJP remaining in power for decades and Modi's " Abki Baar 400 Paar" slogan.

He argued that such statements were inconsistent with the normal operation of democratic politics. However, BJP has rejected Rahul's allegations, while the Election Commission has maintained that the reported objections were part of its internal decision-making process and that its final decisions, including those related to SIR, were unanimous.

The dispute over the electoral-roll revision and the reported objections by the two election commissioners is now at the centre of the political exchange between Congress, BJP and the poll panel.

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