The Siddaramaiah-led Congress government in Karnataka is set to revive prosecution in two cases involving alleged illegal collection of voter data by a private agency in Bengaluru during the BJP regime in 2022, by filing objections to petitions opposing police investigations. The petitions had resulted in a Karnataka High Court stay on the probe since December 22, 2022.
The state government, which has appointed former Advocate General Prof Ravi Varma Kumar as special counsel in the alleged voter data theft cases, has sought to file objections in the stalled matters. The High Court recently granted two weeks for the objections to be filed.
“Prof Ravi Varma Kumar, learned special counsel for the respondents, seeks two weeks to file a statement of objections in the cases, in which the statement of objections is not yet filed and the matters would be heard on merits,” the Karnataka High Court said on February 4.
Kumar was appointed as special counsel to facilitate the revival of investigations into two cases registered by Bengaluru police in November 2022 at the instance of the Election Commission (EC) over alleged illegal voter data collection by a private trust.
Two FIRs were registered after EC officials alleged that a private group, the Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Trust, had illegally collected voter data in the Mahadevapura constituency and other parts of Bengaluru under the Commission’s Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) programme.
Ahead of the 2023 state Assembly polls, the Congress had alleged that the Chilume Group was linked to BJP leaders in Bengaluru and that the firm had been awarded voter data collection work as part of an exercise to manipulate electoral rolls through deletions and additions.
Investigations into the FIRs registered at Halsurgate and Kadugodi police stations in the Mahadevapura region were halted in December 2022 after the High Court imposed an interim stay on the probe following petitions filed by arrested Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and officials of the Chilume Trust.
While the probe has remained stalled since then, the state government, in a move seen as an attempt to revive investigations, appointed Prof Ravi Varma Kumar as special counsel on November 27, 2025.
The appointment came in the backdrop of allegations of “vote chori” raised by Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi in August 2025 regarding the Mahadevapura Assembly constituency and again in September 2025 in relation to the Aland Assembly constituency in Kalaburagi district.
A government order issued on November 27, 2025 stated that the special counsel would represent the state in contesting petitions filed by the Chilume Trust, on behalf of the Bengaluru police which had been investigating the allegations before the probe was stayed.
In the 2022 cases, officials of the Chilume Trust are alleged to have connived with Bengaluru civic officials to create fake identity cards of booth-level officers of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and conduct door-to-door collection of voter data under the guise of voter awareness work for the EC.
How did allegations surface?
Allegations of voter data theft in Mahadevapura first surfaced in September 2022 after a local NGO raised concerns over the Chilume Group deploying private workers posing as civic officials to carry out the ECI’s SVEEP programme, including voter registration and linking of voter IDs with Aadhaar through the Commission’s Garuda App.
Police arrested 10 persons in the case, including Chilume Enterprises director Ravikumar Krishnappa, three other company officials, and four BBMP revenue officers accused of facilitating the alleged fraud. All the accused were later released.
The EC also directed then Bengaluru Regional Commissioner Amlan Aditya Biswas, an IAS officer, to conduct an administrative inquiry into complaints of misuse of voter awareness activities and alleged data capture by a private entity in BBMP areas.
The inquiry report stated that no electoral fraud or manipulation of electoral rolls was detected in the Shivajinagar, Chickpet and Mahadevapura constituencies, and that there was no evidence of intrusion into or tampering with data on ERO.net or the operation of the Garuda App.
However, the probe found that BBMP had allowed the Chilume Group to “illegally collect voter data on an unauthorised private digital application (Digital Sameeksha) and store it on a foreign server, thereby creating opportunities for wrongful gain from personal data”.
Ahead of the appointment of a special counsel, a Congress worker in the Mahadevapura constituency filed a complaint in November 2025 alleging illegal addition of names to voter lists prior to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Mahadevapura had also figured in Gandhi’s August 2025 presentation alleging vote theft, in which he claimed that nearly one lakh votes had been illegally added to the constituency’s electoral rolls.
Congress worker Y Vinoda, 39, filed the complaint with Whitefield police on November 19, 2025, stating that she was “deeply pained” by allegations that fake voters had been added to the rolls by unknown officials and private individuals.
However, questions have been raised over the validity of the FIR registered on her complaint, as only the EC and its authorised officials are empowered to initiate complaints regarding electoral roll fraud after verification.
In the Aland constituency — where an alleged illegal vote deletion racket highlighted by Congress candidate B R Patil in 2023 was later spotlighted by Gandhi on September 18, 2025 — local police registered an FIR after the EC found attempts to illegally delete 5,994 voters to be genuine.
A Special Investigation Team of the Karnataka CID filed a chargesheet on December 19, 2025, naming former BJP MLA Subhash Guttedar, 74, his son Harshananda, aide Tipperudra, data centre operators Akram Pasha and Aslam Pasha, associate Md Ashfaq, and Bapi Adya, a youth from West Bengal accused of providing an “OTP bypass” to access ECI online services.
Patil, who had raised the issue after being alerted by party workers, went on to win the 2023 Assembly election from Aland by 10,348 votes, defeating Guttedar, who had earlier won the seat in 2018 by a margin of 697 votes.