New Delhi: In a fresh scathing attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party over alleged ‘vote chori’ or vote theft, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi claimed that the photo of a Brazilian model appeared on Haryana’s electoral list.
According to Gandhi, she represents one case among a total of 25 lakh stolen votes, which includes 19.26 lakh bulk voters, 5.21 lakh duplicate voters, and 93,174 invalid voters. In a press conference Wednesday, he said that this ‘vote chori’ is a centralised operation.
“This lady was fed into the electoral list at the centralised level, not at the booth level”, Gandhi said. In a visual presentation, he showed photos of the woman, in a blue denim jacket, on different voting slips. He alleged that there are 22 votes with the photo across 10 booths in the Rai constituency.
The photo appears on the voting slips with various names—Seema, Sweety, Vimla, Saraswati, Lakshmi, and more. “What is a Brazilian woman doing on the electoral list of Haryana?” Gandhi said.
Haryana Assembly elections were held in 2024, where the BJP won 48 seats out of 90 and Nayab Singh Saini became the chief minister.
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Photographer not found
In the visual slideshow, Gandhi showed the details of the woman next to a QR code. The code leads to a Brazilian photographer’s page on Unsplash, a free online platform that provides royalty-free photos. Photographers from around the world share their photos on the platform.
Several photos of the woman are featured on photographer Matheus Ferrero’s page on Unsplash. They are free to download and have been used by several users on the internet. A Google reverse image search reveals that the photo is available on other free stock photo platforms such as Pexels, Freerange Stock, and Printrest.
The photo was first uploaded on Unsplash on 2 March 2017 with no caption. Another photo of the same woman was uploaded from a different angle on 8 August. The caption said “Jean Jacket”. It was subsequently uploaded on other websites in the following years.
The identity of the woman could not be confirmed through reverse image search.
After Gandhi’s press conference, people quickly found the social media handles of Ferrero. The last post on his Instagram, uploaded 26 weeks ago, suddenly started getting viral. “You are viral in India, bro!” read a comment.
By the end of day, however, Ferraro’s profile had disappeared from Instagram. It now shows up as “Instagram User”, suggesting that the profile has either been taken down or deactivated.
The image has been used by several Indian news organisations earlier. In one of the posts by NDTV, the photo has been used as a feature photo on a skincare web story.
The photo has also been used for a blog published on Allure, a wellness brand that offers a wide variety of cosmetic treatments.
The photo also appears in an article about ‘daytime makeup’ on Seema.
In the 2024 Rai Assembly elections, Krishna Gahlawat of the BJP won by 4,673 votes against the INC candidate Jai Bhagwan Antil.
In the press conference, Gandhi accused the BJP of fabricating votes not just in Haryana but also in other states.
“We’ve experienced this pattern in many states, so we decided to dig deeper into Haryana. All (exit) polls pointed to a Congress victory,” he said.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)