Indian election goes global: Brazilian ‘model’ casts 22 votes in Haryana
A woman in Haryana voted once. Her photo, however, voted 22 times – under different names. Even stranger, the face on her voter card wasn’t hers at all. It belonged to a Brazilian hairdresser, lifted straight off a stock image site.
Welcome to India’s voter roll nightmare – a bizarre mix of bureaucratic chaos, digital forgery, and political outrage that’s fast morphing into one of the biggest credibility crises for the world’s largest democracy.
“I cast my vote,” said Munesh from Haryana’s Rai constituency. “But that photo Rahul Gandhi showed – I don’t know who that woman is.”
That “woman” was Larissa Nery, a hairdresser from São Paulo who posed for that picture eight years ago. This week, she found herself at the center of a political hurricane after Rahul Gandhi waved her image on national television, claiming it was proof of “massive, industrial-scale voter fraud.”
“They’re portraying me as Indian to scam people, guys. What madness!” Nery exclaimed in a viral Instagram video that’s now being replayed endlessly across Indian news channels.
The Brazilian connection
The Congress leader claims this is no isolated blunder. “One woman. Five names. Twenty-two votes. This isn’t random – it’s organised theft,” Gandhi said, alleging a centrally orchestrated plan to “convert Congress victories into BJP wins.”
According to his calculation, 2.5 million fake votes were cast in Haryana’s 2024 election – enough to flip several close seats. In Rai, the BJP’s Krishna Gahlawat defeated Congress rival Bhagwan Antil by just 4,673 votes.
The BJP hit back within hours. “There’s nothing left in Bihar, so Rahul Gandhi is trying to shift the narrative to Haryana,” mocked Union Minister Kiren Rijiju, dismissing the claims as “pre-poll drama.”
The Election Commission, too, shrugged it off. Officials insisted that Congress never raised these issues during the Haryana vote audit and dismissed Gandhi’s evidence as “unverified and misleading.”
But then came the NDTV fact-finding trip. On the ground in Sonipat, reporters found voter lists riddled with missing names, duplicate entries, and mysteriously deleted families – including one in Malikpur village where four members had simply vanished from the rolls.
From stock photos to phantom sons
If that wasn’t surreal enough, rewind to August in Varanasi, where the electoral roll listed one Ramkamal Das as the father of 48 sons – thirteen of them, somehow, born in the same year.
The viral image of that roll sparked a nationwide firestorm, with protests sweeping Delhi and Patna. Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi were detained outside the Election Commission office as they accused authorities of “institutionalised voter theft.”
“This fight isn’t political – it’s for the Constitution,” Rahul shouted as he was bundled into a police van.
Opposition leaders claim the anomalies aren’t accidents but a pattern – one that now stretches from Haryana to Bihar, where a massive voter list revision threatens to strip millions of poor and marginalised citizens of their right to vote.
The Bihar faultline
Bihar, with nearly 80 million voters, is under a sweeping “Special Intensive Revision” by the Election Commission – officially to clean up duplicates. But critics say it’s a purge in disguise.
Strict documentation rules have left many scrambling for papers. Birth certificates, passports, and matriculation records are mandatory; Aadhaar cards – used by over a billion Indians – don’t count.
The opposition INDIA bloc warns that as many as 6.5 million legitimate voters could be struck off. “This is Assam 2.0,” said one Congress lawmaker, referencing the 2019 citizenship registry that rendered nearly two million people stateless.
The BJP, meanwhile, has embraced the revision as a patriotic clean-up drive to weed out “illegal immigrants.”
Democracy at risk
The twin scandals – one comic, one chilling – have exposed what many call the soft underbelly of India’s democracy: a voter database so vast, it can hide almost anything.
Fake faces. Phantom families. Vanished citizens.
For a country that prides itself on its free and fair elections, the irony couldn’t be sharper. As one observer quipped,
“When Brazilian models can vote in Haryana and real Indians can’t vote in Bihar, democracy starts looking like fiction.”